The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly soared to +0.72 deg. C in January, 2010. This is the warmest January in the 32-year satellite-based data record.

The tropics and Northern and Southern Hemispheres were all well above normal, especially the tropics where El Nino conditions persist. Note the global-average warmth is approaching the warmth reached during the 1997-98 El Nino, which peaked in February of 1998.

This record warmth will seem strange to those who have experienced an unusually cold winter. While I have not checked into this, my first guess is that the atmospheric general circulation this winter has become unusually land-locked, allowing cold air masses to intensify over the major Northern Hemispheric land masses more than usual. Note this ALSO means that not as much cold air is flowing over and cooling the ocean surface compared to normal. Nevertheless, we will double check our calculations to make sure we have not make some sort of Y2.01K error (insert smiley). I will also check the AMSR-E sea surface temperatures, which have also been running unusually warm.

After last month’s accusations that I’ve been ‘hiding the incline’ in temperatures, I’ve gone back to also plotting the running 13-month averages, rather than 25-month averages, to smooth out some of the month-to-month variability.

We don’t hide the data or use tricks, folks…it is what it is.

[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way, but instead use on-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs) carried on the satellite radiometers. The PRT’s are individually calibrated in a laboratory before being installed in the instruments.]

===============================

NOTE: Entire UAH dataset is here, not yet updated for Jan 2010 as of this posting

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407 thoughts on “UAH global temperature posts warmest January”

This goes to show how limited the value of a “global temperature” metric is. Given the unusual cold across many large land masses this January, a map and physical explanation of the temperature distribution is imperative.

It looks like we might be in the grips of another 1998 style El-Nino event. I can testify that the California Storm abundance and rainfall ammounts are similar to that time so El-Nino is a very likely cause.

I’m excited! I can’t wait for the forthcoming temperature readings over the next months/years. Will we see a continuation of the rise in monitored temperatures yet the world freezes over as the world continues to cool? If so the longer this goes on the more fun we will have when even AGW alarmists start to realize something is crook in the way temperatures are monitored and processed. NASA and others will then fall into disrepute and disappear from the scientific arena, which is a shame given what they have achieved during the moon landings. Hopefully by then we will finally see some of the clowns behind bars, although it should be happening right now since there’s more than enough evidence to prove in a court of law that data is being deliberately corrupted.

It would certainly be interesting to see what really drives the El Nino events like these. Some warmists will put the blame on anthropogenic CO2 but how could a few ppm of CO2 drive such a massive hot water pump?

I can vouch for the effect on the West Coast of Canada. Definitely the evil El Nino at work. The Olympics being held in Vancouver BC are having to truck in snow for the event. We are spared the ravages of the cold winters of the Eastern Seaboard.

Agree with others here – we’re at the peak of the current El Nino event. JAMSTEC who seem to be more accurate in their forecasting than any other agency are predicting a rapid decline in El Nino in the Boreal Autumn (SH fall). In fact they predict a possible return to La Nina conditions by late 2010.

According to WXmaps, they’re showing an increasing amount of land area in negative temp. anomalies when checking on the climate outlooks since sometime last month, depending on how the outlooks shift there could be a drop in anomalies over land this month.

The only big blood red area they have in the projections is over Canada and Greenland.

“[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way”
Ok, there are known problems with surface measurements, (UHI, dubious adjustments, etc.), but, shoudn’t be done this exercise? plotting difference from surface temps vs satelital data, I think it would be very interesting.

Could it possibly be that the surface sea temperature (SST) and radiance long-wave satallite readings (AMSR), not total ocean heat content (OHC), are telling us of an unusual relation of energy flux if radiance balances between the sun’s temperture (TSI related) and global LW average output shifts?

TSI is near a low so OHC hold abnormally high amount of heat compared to that held, such as in the pre-1700, when we know TSI was also low. As this excess heat moves not deeper but back out of the oceans depths, could that actually cause a “surface” warming (Low altitude AMSR and SST)? I’m curious.

Most land showing record lows but oceans (the mass holding most of the earths heat) are showing record highs. Layers above tropopause showing record lows too. What’s going on?

Have any of those PRT’s placed in satellites ever been recovered after use and shown to hold their calibration?

I know the Shuttle was used to place some satellites. I don’t know if it was used to recover any and bring them back to the ground. However it would take either that or a similar space capsule mission to properly obtain them for rechecking. The normal method of satellite re-entry adds uncertainty to the process. Also some shuttle missions serviced satellites, so perhaps they might have brought back some used PRT’s that had been replaced.

The land in the northern hemisphere is mostly cold and the ocean surfaces are warm ; does this mean that the oceans are getting warmer or that they are giving up heat ? it should be an interesting year.

It all shows the power of a negative Arctic Oscillation in suppressing the normal poleward movement of the air circulation systems that would usually follow from an El Nino event.

All or most of the energy pumped into the air by the El Nino remained over equatorial oceanic regions and was not dispersed poleward so there was an enhanced positive anomaly in those regions.

At the same time the movement of the polar high pressure cells equatorward allowed room for lower pressure at the poles with a consequence that air flowed more freely into and out of the poles. Thus polar regions were also anomalously warm.

In contrast the mid latitude continental areas were starved of warmth from the equatorial regions and at the same time received more cold air than usual from the poles.

Overall the two warmer regions outweighed the colder regions.

I see this as an unusual heat distribution rather than a sign that the current possible global cooling trend has reversed.

As I have said elsewhere a quiet sun seems to reduce energy loss to space by encouraging a more negative Arctic Oscillation. We have recently begun a trend towards negative (cooling) oceans and a quiet sun tends to offset the (global) cooling effect of negative oceans.

That does mean however that when an El Nino occurs during a negative ocean phase then the quiet sun will enhance the effect whilst the El Nino subsists. That El Nino enhancing effect is over time more than offset by the general cooling effect of a background negative oceanic phase because oceanic effects are faster and more powerful than solar effects.

When the El Nino fades the energy still in the equatorial regions will be pumped poleward and out to space quickly with the subsequent La Nina then compounding the overall cooling trend.

The continental regions having become so cold the warmer air from the equatorial regions will be neutralised quickly when it does start to move poleward again.

I suspect that the rest of the northern henisphere winter will be nearer average than the first part but as the El Nino fades I expect to see another cool northern summer and an average southern winter.

The true test will be in the scale and length of the next La Nina. If it happens whilst the sun becomes more active then a true tropospheric cooling scenario will take hold with a faster loss of energy to space at the same time as the oceans deny more energy to the air.

I accept the speculative nature of this description but I put it forward as a test of my ideas to be confirmed or rebutted by real world events over the next two years or less.

Even before this latest month, the UAH data showed a stronger trend than the IPCC trend estimate. So despite the various claimed problems with GISS and Had/Crut, this UAH data set shows strong global warming.

Any high school science or maths teacher can download the data and run a regression as a class exercise. It will show a warming trend in the UAH data stronger than that stated by the IPCC.

So while there may well be problems with GISS and Had/Crut, they don’t seem to undermine the AGW hypothesis.

Before someone picks on it,
“Most land showing record lows but oceans (the mass holding most of the earths heat)”
should have read
“Most land showing record lows but oceans (the mass holding most of the earths heat) surface readings“

Is their Satellite Broke. Here in S. MN. near the Iowa border, it conitues to be extremely cold (1 day made it above freezing, with munerous below zero readings) continuing on from the cold 2009. Europe very Cold too. Where is so warm in NH not only to make up for the extreme cold but make the satellite tell us it is the warmest ever? Sure seems surrealistically impossible…..John.

[quote: vibenna (14:53:07) :]
Any high school science or maths teacher can download the data and run a regression as a class exercise. It will show a warming trend in the UAH data stronger than that stated by the IPCC.
[/quote]

It will show a warming trend during an El Nino that is stronger than the IPCC trend with no El Nino

If you’re trying to hang your hat an El Nino for a long term tend, you’ll be disappointed.

“It looks like we might be in the grips of another 1998 style El-Nino event. I can testify that the California Storm abundance and rainfall ammounts are similar to that time so El-Nino is a very likely cause.”
______________________________________________________________________________

Exactly what I was thinking, Bryan. I would expect to see above-average rainfall through March up here in Northern California, especially in the Russian River watershed.

The rainy days feel noticeably colder to me as well. Then again, maybe I am just feeling the effects of old age. :D

Well that should spell the death of the ‘global warming has ended’ meme. And the ‘it’s the sun’ meme too, seeing as solar activity is so low. Also, I wish Roy would put his 4th-order polynomial trend line back in – it was very instructive.

Ray (14:30:59) : You wrote, “It would certainly be interesting to see what really drives the El Nino events like these. Some warmists will put the blame on anthropogenic CO2 but how could a few ppm of CO2 drive such a massive hot water pump?”

Warmists have tried to blame anthropogenic greenhouse gases for the increase in frequency of El Nino events since 1976 with little to no success. The problem for their argument is downward longwave radiation (from greenhouse gases) only impacts the top few centimeters of the oceans. And if we look at a time-series graph of tropical Pacific Ocean Heat Content (OHC)…
…you’ll note that there are long-term drops (not rises) in tropical Pacific OHC. The only significant rises occur during multiyear La Nina events (or during lesser La Nina events with unusually high trade winds like the one in 1995/96).

[quote:Sordnay (14:37:44) :]
“[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way”
Ok, there are known problems with surface measurements, (UHI, dubious adjustments, etc.), but, shoudn’t be done this exercise? plotting difference from surface temps vs satelital data, I think it would be very interesting.
[/quote]

Just a technical note. The UAH satellite readings are not calibrated using surface measurements. But they have been validated using surface measurements. They are also validated using weather balloons.

Calibration is used to adjust raw readings in order to make them accurate. Validation is used to ensure calibration was done correctly.

If the northern hemisphere polar region was warmer than “normal” during the northern hemisphere winter (ie zero solar isolation) then that would imply that net heat loss to space in the polar latitudes was very likely much higher than normal.

Since the global average temperature does not really measure heat content, or net thermal energy balance (ie heat flow to space vs heat flow absorbed from the sun) but only temperature, I question if a higher average global temperature really means anything important without considering the context.

The El Nino 98 for the North East produced north eastern storms that started as snow, than changed to rain for southern New England. This year almost all Northeasterner storms have gone too far south. This El Nino is different from the 98 one, and has been unable to push the jet stream north like the one in 98.

“UAH global temperature posts warmest January”

Yeah sure, somehow most folks have not felt this January heat wave. But Hansen promised a barbecue year, he must know something?

I’ve got a question. Is not everthing you are raising a short-term (1-2 year) re-distribution of the earth’s heat. So when the effects you are mentioning balance out in near-future, the readings should all return to their normal levels or go the opposite side of normal. (That is, no long-term, permanent step up or down and normal being the long-term average)?

Shouldn’t somebody, someday tell a journalist about this thing called the Ocean Heat Content? So that he can tell his colleagues? And write it into an article in the MSM? I know, the concept is outlandish… Heat! In an ocean!

The high January anomaly has been anticipated for some time. We’ll probably get a few more warm months and may even get 12 month (rolling if not calendar) record. The interesting thing will be what happens after that. Will there be a repeat of the 1998-2007 pattern, i.e La Nina followed by a ‘new’ higher background level of temperatures or something different.

Despite the weaker sun and the negative PDO, I don’t see any likelihood of significant cooling.

Does anyone know how well the satellite handle snow cover? I ask because the NH probably has the highest percentage of snow cover in history and out pops satellite data that shows the warmest January ever recorded by the satellite. Matches with the most snow cover ever?…..John….

2. Looking at the graph above- the 1998 El Nino pushed the temperatures up a great deal from a valley around 1993. This years El Nino has pushed the temperatures up not so much, but from a higher level.

Stephen Wilde: You wrote, “As I have said elsewhere a quiet sun seems to reduce energy loss to space by encouraging a more negative Arctic Oscillation.”

And once again I will recommend that you plot the data before you make statements. There was a correlation between solar activity and the AO during Solar Cycles 22 and 23, but before 1983 and after 2003, they do not correlate.

The rest of your comment could be brilliant and spot on, Stephen, but that one assumed correlation that does not exist calls into question the remainder of your comment.

magicjava – I agree the trend estimate will be biased by heterogeneity in warm/cold events (PDO, as well as El Nino). But I don’t think that will change the underlying trend, especially given there is now 30 years of data. The UAH trend was substantially stronger than the IPCC forecast even before January’s temperature spike.

“Just a technical note. The UAH satellite readings are not calibrated using surface measurements. But they have been validated using surface measurements. They are also validated using weather balloons.

Calibration is used to adjust raw readings in order to make them accurate. Validation is used to ensure calibration was done correctly.”

What happens if validation with surface measurement does not match? Is satellite data calibration adjusted based on surface data or is surfce measurements corrected based on satellite data?

Is satellite data calibrated based on surface measurements, but if validation fails calibration is not adjusted?

What is used as a surface data in this case? Is it data from NASA or as with UAH, is surface reference temperature coming from UAH?

Who does this calibration, NASA or UAH?

Sorry that I’m asking so many questions, but the processing for satellite data is new to me..

…it is unlikely that 2008 will be a year with truly exceptional global mean temperature. These considerations also suggest that, barring the unlikely event of a large volcanic eruption, a record global temperature clearly exceeding that of 2005 can be expected within the next 2-3 years.

“Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance. GISS Dec 2008.”

If the El Nino effect has not yet peaked, then might we see this prediction confirmed even in the satelite data?

OT: From The Guardian:
“……..If global warming is as catastrophic as its champions in the science community claim – and as expensive to rectify – its evidence must surely be cross-tested over and again. Yet it has been left to freelancers and wild-cat bloggers to challenge the apparently rickety temperature sequences on which warming alarmism has been built.

No professional body is checking all this. Assertions are treated as scientific fact even when they come from such lobbyists as the World Wildlife Fund (on whose politics see Raymond Bonner’s At the Hand of Man). If their conclusions are wrong, they are demanding money with false menaces. If they are right, their abuse of evidence and political naivety jeopardises life on earth. ……..”

Peter Miller, you’re indicating a drop of sea surface temp by .71 and Dr. Spenser is indicating a global-average lower tropospheric temperature rise of .72. Isn’t this a bit odd, shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Vibeena (14:50;07)
Even before this latest month, the UAH data showed a stronger trend than the IPCC trend estimate. So despite the various claimed problems with GISS and Had/Crut, this UAH data set shows strong global warming.
Any high school science or maths teacher can download the data and run a regression as a class exercise. It will show a warming trend in the UAH data stronger than that stated by the IPCC.
So while there may well be problems with GISS and Had/Crut, they don’t seem to undermine the AGW hypothesis

You can easily conduct a regression analysis on temperature data. If you pick the right data you can project a rapid increase in the projected UAH temperatures. For example, if you selected UAH data from 1993 to 1998 you would conclude that there is a very rapid rate of heating. Would you say that projection is correct? Proving whether the warming of the planet is due to anthropological sources of CO2 or whether it is due to increases in solar activity depends upon having an understanding the mechanisms operating to produce heating of the planet. Correlations of data are not proof of any mechanism. The details of either of these mechanisms are missing independent verifications. That is why many of us are skeptics.

magicjava (15:15:04) :
“Just a technical note. The UAH satellite readings are not calibrated using surface measurements. But they have been validated using surface measurements. They are also validated using weather balloons.”
.
From this wonderful guest post here on WUWT from Dr Spencer, https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/12/how-the-uah-global-temperatures-are-produced/
I understood that, calibrations with those PRT’s is done once every earth scan, also as you said it was validated with weather baloons.
Also there stated that “The variable emissivity problem is the smallest for well-vegetated surfaces, and largest for snow-covered surfaces.”
So this is why I wonder if validations were also done with this cold conditions.

There is one aspect of this 14,000 ft atmospheric temperature data, and also the higher stratospheric temperatures, that intrigues me.

I read papers that talk of a cooling stratosphere resulting in less outgoing LWIR; which to me suggests that the authors are suggesting that the source of earth’s outgoing radiant energy is in fact the cold high very thin stratospheric atmospheric radiation.

Does it occur to anyone that there is a lot of LWIR radiation, that actually originates at the earth’s surface; actually at much higher temperatures than those puny stratospheric air molecules; and furthermore, those emission from hotter surface areas can go zipping on by a lot of GHG molecules, in the various “atmospheric windows” that exist.

So just where is the outgoing radiation sourced from, and just how important is it that the stratospheric temperatures might cool (or warm for that matter).

Personally, it seems to me, that ourgoing radiation is sourced from the surface and all levels of the atmosphere, and a good bit of it exits unhindered by GHGs and other atmospheric gremlins.

Now I do believe that these goings on at 14,000 ft or other levels are important to understand, or at least observe. Right now it is not clear to me how important a 14,000 ft anomaly of 0.72 deg C really is. And of course I understand the “weather is not climate” mantra.

The Pacific Northwest has been experiencing an extraordinarily mild winter weather while much of the rest of the Continental United States and Canada have been experiencing an extremely cold winter. The winter has been so mild in the Puget Sound region of Western Washington, there has been a false Spring of sorts in late December and January with flowers emerging early and trees budding early. If the normal weather patterns return in late February and March, these plants may be badly damaged by the frosts. Just across the Cascade Mountains to the east, bitter cold conditions extending all the way to New England and Maritime Canada are killing some native plants which are normally hardy in those regions.

So, if the present day land surface weather air temperatures record bitter cold temperatures in the boreal winter while satellite observations are recording worldwide warmth, then we must ask what are the implications for the past time periods in which there were no satellite records to contrast with the bitter cold boreal winter land surface weather air temperatures? Data infilling and assumptions about the austral summer and boreal winter in the pre-satellite era would have no way of detecting the kinds of anomolies we are seeing in the present observaitonal systems. Wouldn’t such apples and oranges comparisons artificially create a warming trend which does not exist in reality?

Ian C. (14:31:06) “The Olympics being held in Vancouver BC are having to truck in snow for the event.”

They’ve now resorted to $10,000 per hour heavy-lift helicoptering of snow. I left the following note in “Tips & Notes to WUWT” yesterday:

–
2010 Winter Olympic “snow crisis” in Vancouver:

1) $10,000 per hour helicoptering of snow.
2) $150,000 trucking of snow from nearly 300km away.
3) And look at the massive stockpiles of HAY they’ve trucked in TO SUBSTITUTE FOR SNOW – (they just use the trucked-in & helicoptered-in snow to cover the hay after they fly the hay up the mountain with other helicopters, that ‘only’ cost $1,000 per hour).

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:
Watch the whole video – if you’re a BC carbontaxpayer, this will make you IRATE; if not, you might die laughing at the ridiculousness:

Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki is BLAMING GLOBAL WARMING for the Olympic “snow crisis”. (Actually, it’s El Nino – these types of winters are NOT uncommon here.)

VANOC says they are factoring the trucking/helicoptering into their carbon footprint analysis – will the public get honest numbers? – perhaps by averaging Suzuki & VANOC numbers.
–

Re: Ray (15:32:02)

That National Post article is not very impressive. El Nino vs. La Nina makes a huge difference here – and so does elevation. Maybe that writer didn’t get out much when he was living here. The winters vary substantially – (last winter we had nearly non-stop snow at sea-level for 3 straight weeks). Mid-elevations are particularly unstable at a biweekly-timescale most winters – something most lower-income people in the expensive city might not notice because they can rarely afford to leave town – and the wealthy few generally only drive through mid-elevations on the way to the ski-hill.

“Just a technical note. The UAH satellite readings are not calibrated using surface measurements. But they have been validated using surface measurements. They are also validated using weather balloons.

Calibration is used to adjust raw readings in order to make them accurate. Validation is used to ensure calibration was done correctly.”

What happens if validation with surface measurement does not match? Is satellite data calibration adjusted based on surface data or is surfce measurements corrected based on satellite data?

Is satellite data calibrated based on surface measurements, but if validation fails calibration is not adjusted?

What is used as a surface data in this case? Is it data from NASA or as with UAH, is surface reference temperature coming from UAH?

Who does this calibration, NASA or UAH?

Sorry that I’m asking so many questions, but the processing for satellite data is new to me.. “””

JP, I think if you keep up with the dialog, you will find that Dr Spencer has in fact explained exactly how their satellite temperature measurments ARE calibrated.

Do you understnad that if the satellite thermometers, are calibrated on the satellite in real time, against perfectly well accepted laboratory standards of SI system temperature, that there is nothing to gain by comparing them to the very same sorts of standards that happen to be maintained here on the surface.

The satellite “thermometers” are NOT reading temperatures (of atmosphere) out in space; but actually at about 14,000 ft altitude; and those readings are matched agaisnt standards that are maintained on board the satellite.

So a dollar bill on the satellite is just as good as a dollar bill on the ground; almost as good as dime in fact.

Calibration against ground standards is quite unnecessary, so long as one calibrates against recognized and accepted laboratory standards, and the satellite is full of those; as Dr Roy has explained in detail.

Now if they were measuring the 14,000 ft data and comparing against the Pyramid Inch, on board the satellite, you would have something to be concerned about. I haven’t asked Roy, if they have a Pyramid Inch standard on board; but they do have good Platinum Resistance Laboratory Standard Thermometers on board to compare their readings to.

Bob Tisdale (15:55:42) “There was a correlation between solar activity and the AO during Solar Cycles 22 and 23, but before 1983 and after 2003, they do not correlate.http://i49.tinypic.com/30lkjm8.png “

It’s a good deal more complicated than that – the relations don’t go away – they’re just not so easy to detect. I’m still working on cross-wavelet approaches to detection. I’m finding nonrandom (but complex) phase relations – it will take time & patience to sort the signals out.

Does anyone know how well the satellite handle snow cover? I ask because the NH probably has the highest percentage of snow cover in history and out pops satellite data that shows the warmest January ever recorded by the satellite. Matches with the most snow cover ever?…..John…. “””

I think they rely on the fact that none of that NH snow is actually at 14,000 ft altitude, which is where UAH is taking their readings.

So i think the answer is that your snow doesn’t have any effect on their readings.

Something is not right with that UAH thing. Folks everywhere are shaking thier heads at these warmest ever months, and darned few can lay claim to being in the middle of some egg-frying record heat.
Don’t make no sense.
A big dump is on it’s way to the Mid-Atlantic on US East Coast, a mild El-Nino has rain coming down around my ears, but where oh where is that blast furnace heat?

What does it mean, when satellite temperature data does not correspond with record low temperatures measured in situ on the land, on the ice pack, and in the sea ? can it be that there is some error in the data. Remember the “missing” million sq km of ice last year …….

CO2 based global warming posits that the poles will preferentially heat up. Is there a spike at the poles or is the spike clustered nearer the equator? If closer to the equator, is it related to the El Nino?

This will be a two-edged sword for AGW proponents. They may jump up and down at it being the warmest on record, but when it is broadcast to the public in the northern hemisphere it is really really not going to go down well! Expect a lot more people to think the AGW crowd do not know what they are talking about, even though, unusually, it will actually be true!

I would be interested in separate graphs for the northern and southern hemispheres.

The argument that was used last year when satellite temperatures were lower than surface was that it would take time for the “heat” to move from the surface into the higher levels measured by the satellites. What I would like to see is how this months satellite correlates with the surface anomaly. Since what we have seen is a significant NAO anomaly this year, the distribution of energy between surface air and lower troposphere is likely to be affected.

I am still not convinced that monthly changes in temperatures are giving us a real picture of the energy in the system, only changes in the distribution. The fact that the yearly ‘global temperature’ is lower in the northern hemisphere winter is proof that we are only looking at one portion of the energy in the whole system. I know that the ocean is a much bigger heat sink than the atmosphere so can we account for this using ocean heat content?

I am not up to speed with the different metrics, but if we can’t yet account for the where the energy is coming from and going to then this is where we should be focusing research. Aren’t there supposed to be a few hundred millions going to NASA for climate change research now? Don’t you think we should use some of this for real research?

I still see general cooling in the record since the last big El Nino spike in 98. I doubt surface temps will show this spike right now. And I doubt manmade global warming is the cause of this spike.

In a few months when quick cooling in the data set comes what will the warming believers have to make them feel the victory they are feeling as the look at this January spike in UAH? They should be careful not to feel over confident at this time because that feeling of victory is going to be short lived.

As they have always harped on us about, one month of data is not a trend.

As one commentor has put it, weather patterns on earth are like a lava lamp. The lumps of lava are never in the same place twice, never the same shape twice, etc. The warming in the region that satellites measure is not the same as where surface temps are measured. The heat and cold, and other weather factors, move around.

Still, if you look at the data sets you’ll see there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995. And there has been general cooling since 2005.

“Even before this latest month, the UAH data showed a stronger trend than the IPCC trend estimate…..Any high school science or maths teacher can download the data and run a regression as a class exercise. It will show a warming trend in the UAH data stronger than that stated by the IPCC.”

carrot eater (16:09:14) : You wrote, “I don’t think that’s fair. People have looked at it, sure, but it isn’t obvious what if any impact there would be on ENSO. At least, that’s the impression I have.”

But you missed the remainder of my reply, which read…
The problem for their argument is downward longwave radiation (from greenhouse gases) only impacts the top few centimeters of the oceans. And if we look at a time-series graph of tropical Pacific Ocean Heat Content (OHC)…
…you’ll note that there are long-term drops (not rises) in tropical Pacific OHC. The only significant rises occur during multiyear La Nina events (or during lesser La Nina events with unusually high trade winds like the one in 1995/96).

@ Peter of Sydney (14:26:51) : I’m excited! I can’t wait for the forthcoming temperature readings over the next months/years. Will we see a continuation of the rise in monitored temperatures yet the world freezes over as the world continues to cool?

This got me thinking. I’m no expert or anything, so I apologize if this is naive or flat-out wrong, but…could there be an inverse correlation between atmospheric temps and land temperatures? It seems that if the satellite data read warm, it’s cold on the ground. And vice versa. Maybe it’s just me, but that thought has occurred to me before, and Peter’s comment just reminded me again, and I just thought I’d ask.

I am skeptical of the “theory” of most warming occuring at the poles. I think this might be, possibly, because that is where the AGWers’ charts show most red. But, we also note that the fewer thermometers, the larger the red.

“This certainly raises some questions about the accuracy of any historic land-based record and could represent a new learning experience.”

I will agree with that. Instead of the “it’s colder/it’s warmer fight” we should (and are) paying attention to the change in pattern. If I am reading this correctly we are having an additional lost of energy from the greater snow cover in the NH and the warmer arctic, and if I understand this correctly from Bob Tisdale the warmer sea surface actually translates into a DROP in the ocean heat content.

“[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way, but instead use on-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs) carried on the satellite radiometers. The PRT’s are individually calibrated in a laboratory before being installed in the instruments.]”

The satellites aren’t calibrated to surface thermometer data? To what are they calibrated? My limited understanding is that the satellites measure a proxy of actual temperature and this had to be correlated to actual thermometer readings. To do this, surface thermometer data was used.

Therefore, given the known urban heat island problems with surface thermometers, can we rely on the satellite readings?

Humans commonly migrated to a climate which suited them until people started with the fences and title deeds. Now people are stuck where they are and cannot easily migrate with the climate shifts, without causing strife and war.

[quote John from MN (15:38:38) :]
Does anyone know how well the satellite handle snow cover? I ask because the NH probably has the highest percentage of snow cover in history and out pops satellite data that shows the warmest January ever recorded by the satellite. Matches with the most snow cover ever?…..John….
[/quote]

No, I don’t think anyone knows.

Which is yet another reason Dr. Spencer should release his source code to the public.

I’m cooking diner right now, will try to answer other questions on this thread shortly.

the aqua project is just that, a project, not just a satellite. to determine ice thickness, snow cover etc is not a simple matter of reading the brightness, it must be calculated.
first off the type of snow must be known for a certain area for the crystal structure which can vary greatly, then a calculation can be made against the brightness. if snow cover changes dramatically for an area, i dont think there is a way the calculation can determine just how much more or less snow there is. but obviously the aqua people have found a way to calculate this, and apply it.

If someone who has ignored Spencer for years now suddenly start citing his results, they better take notice of his results when temperatures go down as well.

Otherwise it is just another case of cherry picking the warmest results to prove a point of view. Personally I believe that Spencer provides the most objective global temperatures out there, and believe in him: up or down.

Well you could say that CO2 did it and that we must stop all industry and modern life in the next month or else we will all die, but then you could argue that the extended length that the sun has been quiet is causing an Ocean-wide heat release event which the current El Nino Modoki is a part of.

I’d like to hear about what Tallbloke has to say on this, whether or not we should only be listening to NOAA and the IPCC from now on.

1) What’s the big deal? Based on any meteorological records that haven’t been kept for many centuries, every month can be a maximum this or minimum that, any time. The smaller is the data set, the more frequent are extremes.

2) Having said that, I don’t believe that the shown UAH data are correct. If it’s government-financed, then somehow, somewhere, somebody faked something. It just cannot be otherwise, it’s the law of human nature.

There is a large disconnect between the data and the experience, and it would be good if someone would explain in simple terms why the people in most of North America, Europe and Asia can’t believe their lying eyes that their yard is covered with 6″ of partly cloudy that will not melt while the record has them well above normal. Hello?

I trust Dr. Spencer, and I have trusted satellite readings over surface stations for some time. However satellite temps have started to raise questions for me since the start of the severe NH winter. One issue is that satellites are measuring microwave emissions from oxygen molecules at various layers in the atmosphere and we know the atmosphere has been contracting for most of the satellite era. The second issue is that the snow cover in the NH this winter best compares with winters in the pre satellite era.

I would have greater confidence in temperature readings from remote sensing systems in current conditions if a coordinated validation exercise were carried out. This would require a few weeks of preparation, and would involve a series of radiosonde balloon launches at points along the projected ground track of the satellite to be tested. At each launch point several balloons would need to be released at staggered intervals so each was at the correct height in the atmosphere over the launch point prior to the satellite over flight. While there would be errors in the true altitude and ground positions of each group of radiosondes, this would be small compared to trying to validate against balloons launched at times and locations uncoordinated with the ground track of the satellite.

The $540000 stimulus grant recently awarded to Dr. Mann could be redirected to carry out this exercise over the continental USA.

Mike J. 17:42:45 That is one of the silliest things I heard in quite some time. When you buy a thermometer do you calibrate it to all the other thermometers in the world or to you trust that the factory calibrated it when they built it. Your thermometer does not care what the thermometer at your neighbors house says.
As it says in the paragraph you mentioned, the instruments are calibrated at the lab. They are reading the temperature independently of an other measurements. Just like your thermometer reads the temperature at your house independent of your neighbor’s thermometers.

Gail Combs: You wrote, “…if I understand this correctly from Bob Tisdale the warmer sea surface actually translates into a DROP in the ocean heat content.”

For the tropical Pacific that’s true. An El Nino event releases heat from the tropical Pacific, and the La Nina event replaces it. Here’s the most current version from a post I should have up tomorrow morning:

But globally, OHC and SST can and does rise at the same time. Over the last three decades they both have risen.

Back on 02 Feb ’10 WUWT had a post “Jo Nova’s ClimateGate Timeline: 30 years in the making (Edition 1.1)” where a commenter “geo (17:25:38)” said :

“This is cool, I like it. . . but you know what I’ve really been wanting recently?
A data flow diagram of data sets starting as raw data, going through a process (and who owns that process) and then being used as an input into the next process and the next data set, etc.
So like how does raw data aggregate into GHCN and GISS and CRUTEMP and data models and who does a process and where along the line.
I’d really like one of those.”
________
I was following the post but there were no return comments on Geo’s comment.

I see a significant value in what he is asking. So does an integrated flow chart exist so we can understand the whole data gathering, sending, processing and the interrelations between various organization?

If it doesn’t exist I would like to help someone do it. I have some time.

I am sure some else has posted this, but this shows the limitations of a single globally averaged number, as many can attest to, given the severity of winter in many places. It also shows the many causes of warmer temps – el nino warming the tropics, tremendous blocking over the NH pole – so although cold there, it is above normal because all the cold air is forced south. It also goes to show the models dont have clue what a warmer “global average” temp would mean for day to day weather for most.

I think a lot of people are thinking “With all the cold we had last month in the northern hemisphere, how could this be the warmest January in the last 30 years? Is it possible the satellite readings are wrong?”

Yes. It’s possible the satellite readings are wrong.

As it travels around the Earth, the AMSU (the instrument used to read what becomes UAH temperature anomalies) reads 30 scans in in the direction perpendicular to its orbit. Two of these scans are directly below the satellite and the each of the other 28 get progressively farther and farther away from the satellite in both the port and starboard directions. The further away from the satellite, the larger the error in its temperature readings.

Note that I didn’t say possible error. There’s no question at all these other 28 readings are wrong. The amount of error can be as high as 30 degrees Kelvin.

These errors are corrected via software. For each channel, the software checks the two neighboring channels and previous readings. This procedure is called a “Limb Adjustment”.

Unfortunately, the Limb Adjustment uses statistical techniques to determine the adjustment values for each footprint, not the hardcoded technique I discussed in my blog post. It’s possible these statistical techniques fail in the face of unusual weather events like what we saw this January.

But without having access to the source code, I can’t tell if these unexpectedly high readings are due to a statistical error in the software calculations or are actually correct.

If the daily SOI index continues at the current rock bottom levels, we could end up seeing another big Kelvin wave and El Nino Modoki picking up again despite the trades not being as weak as they have been. (according to TAO).

Could this El Nino actually drop OHC farther than the one in 97/98 if this means we see this event going on a bit longer than that one? I guess then whether it goes back up depends on what ENSO will do afterwards?

Now natural, skeptical, questions would be: Disregarding IPCC, warmists etc. Are the overall pictures from the temp series
A: Consistent with each other?
B: Consistent with a hypothesis of GHG warming with feedbacks giving, say, 2.5 deg C/doubling of CO2, with some 400 years to new equilibrium?
C. Consistent with a solar forcing hypothesis explaining all the warming?
D: Consistent with Svensmark’s hypothesis?
E: Consistent with Akasofu’s hypothesis?

Feb is not starting off well. It’s at record level as well (I know, only 4 days in…)

Still, this proves that the oceans are in charge. What must be shown is a CO2ocean warming link. That has not been proven. Ocean heat content has been decreasing for the last 5-6 years, ever since ARGO went active….

[quote John Whitman (18:36:51) :]
I see a significant value in what he is asking. So does an integrated flow chart exist so we can understand the whole data gathering, sending, processing and the interrelations between various organization?
[/quote]

I think this will be a great proxy for AWG because if all the heat being released is “trapped” by CO2 then we should see temperatures go up to a higher state and stay there. But if the temperatures go down or stays level then I think it blows the AWG out of the water. See after the 1998 El Nino temps stayed high due to the PDO still positive and AMO peaking positive but now both are negative so the next few years will truly tell us who is correct or maybe something else will come up to crow about.

And we cannot believe this is the warmest January ever when the bulk of the N. Hemisphere OBSERVED a colder winter than has been seen in quite some time.
It makes no sense, Leif, no sense at all.
Where on this planet Earth was the correspoding massive heat to offset the colder winter to produce the warmest global January ever recorded?
Where?
This is absolutely incredulous.
I believe Dr. Spencer is faithfully reporting the data as it comes out the end of the pipeline.
When you see something that says 4-4=3, it’s time to ask what went wrong.
Last year it was a satellite glitch or two.
What is it this time?

As always, the atmosphere surprises us every so often. That is part of the fun behind examining weather. I trust what Roy has posted, and I also think it is related to El Nino.

One thing seems to be constant – all of the big winter storms come up from Texas! Lol! When I lived in Wisconsin, which of course sometimes got really big snowstorms (the biggest I remember was a 20-incher in mid-April 1973), the meteorologists would always refer to that type of storm as coming from a “Panhandle low.” That (relatively) warm, moist Gulf air really adds punch to any low pressure system storm that heads north.

[quote Leif Svalgaard (17:24:37) :
Folks, many posts are pathetic. When satellite data agrees with cooling, you say they are the best thing since sliced bread. When they show warming, you whine about calibration, etc.
[/quote]

I see where you’re coming from with this Dr. Svalgaard, but I don’t think it’s that simple.

An El Nino isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about global warming. The believers will still be believers and the skeptics will still be skeptics.

I think what a lot of folks are thinking is that this January didn’t seem even close to the warmest since 1979. In fact, it was down right cold. So I think folks are trying to reconcile this fact with the satellite readings.

And in doing that, I think it’s natural to ask is there something about this unusual winter that “broke” the satellite. And if you’ve read my post about the statistical processing of the AMSU (which came after your post), you can see there may be something to the idea this strange winter broke the satellite.

Dr. Spencer releasing his source code would solve the issue one way or another.

I agree. There is nothing exceptionally warm or strong about this El Nino.
Snow levels across California have been moderate 3000-5000′. No 7000-10000′ tropical deluges to be found. A few heavy snowfalls, nowhere near the records of big event years. No general flooding across the state.

“Where on this planet Earth was the correspoding massive heat to offset the colder winter to produce the warmest global January ever recorded?
Where?”

Besides the SH, in the Arctic perhaps? If I’m not mistaken the negative Arctic Oscillation caused an extra cold winter in the NH by blowing all that cold air out of the Arctic? There are some neat graphics in the latest ‘Climate Denial Crock of the Week’ (which I won’t be posting here for obvious reasons) on Youtube explaining this.

I didn’t comment on the OHC content graph from Bob Tisdale yet, apparently according to the update there it looks like the rise in OHC preceded the 97/98 El Nino if you carefully count the lines that mark each year, the OHC looked like it was rising through 1995 and 1996 before the big release in 97/98.

[quote Leif Svalgaard (19:42:48) :
magicjava (19:17:28) :
Dr. Spencer releasing his source code would solve the issue one way or another.
You want to slap him with a FOI-request? Just like we all do to CRU and Mann and Co…[/quote]

I was hoping that me repeatedly posting requests to release his source code would work.

So, we had the coldest January since 1938 or so in the UK, well below average temperatures in the rest of Europe, Russia was as cold as ever, China was the coldest it has been in a long time, the central and Eastern US was positively frigid, central Canada was even colder then the central US. Have I got that right so far? Then we have cool temperatures in California and Oregon, and a less then really cold January in Eastern Canada, perhaps even above average. And that is over ½ of the land mass of the planet.

Also I understand that the overall Ocean temperatures have been dropping for the last few years; that would be most of the rest of the planet.

We add all these numbers up, and we get the warmest January in the last 32 years.

Is it possible that the increase in cosmic rays due to lack of sunspots passing through an increased atmospheric density is having an affect on the machine?

Is it at all possible that this satellite is equipped with Pentium V processors?

If they print in any newspaper in the Northern Hemisphere that “Last January was the warmest in almost 40 years”, I think people will simply say; “Just how stupid do they actually think I am” or “I thought they were fudging the numbers, now I am sure they are”.

If sunspots are the driver, there may be a huge lag. A couple of years of surprisingly low sunspots isn’t enough (yet). It could take a few solar cycles for the effects to accumulate to a significant level.

People who staked a claim on global cooling didn’t play their cards well. The alarmists needed a break and we may have given them one. Be smarter next time.

An El Nino isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about global warming. The believers will still be believers and the skeptics will still be skeptics.

——————————————

I think that most people have heard the term ‘El Nino”. But if they were to see the graphs of its effect it wouldn’t mean anything. And if they saw the this January warm spike in UAH it wouldn’t mean anything either.

What does mean something is there’s been longer winters all over the world for 3 years in a row. Florida got froze for days on end. Europe is freezing. China has huge snow. And this year could be another year of record snow in the US.

The average person may be saying “What global warming?”

I don’t think what scientists have to say—or what a trolls in comments on a blog are saying—means anything to them.

“[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way, but instead use on-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs) carried on the satellite radiometers. The PRT’s are individually calibrated in a laboratory before being installed in the instruments.]”

The satellites aren’t calibrated to surface thermometer data? To what are they calibrated? My limited understanding is that the satellites measure a proxy of actual temperature and this had to be correlated to actual thermometer readings. To do this, surface thermometer data was used.

Therefore, given the known urban heat island problems with surface thermometers, can we rely on the satellite readings?

Did you bother to read the NOTE that you provided? It explains the “to what they are calibrated” and it isn’t surface temperatures. Seems to me you read the first sentence, rejected it and went on to postulate your theory.

As it travels around the Earth, the AMSU (the instrument used to read what becomes UAH temperature anomalies) reads 30 scans in in the direction perpendicular to its orbit. Two of these scans are directly below the satellite and the each of the other 28 get progressively farther and farther away from the satellite in both the port and starboard directions. The further away from the satellite, the larger the error in its temperature readings.

Note that I didn’t say possible error. There’s no question at all these other 28 readings are wrong. The amount of error can be as high as 30 degrees Kelvin.

These errors are corrected via software. For each channel, the software checks the two neighboring channels and previous readings. This procedure is called a “Limb Adjustment”.

So then I take it that 2 scans are correct and 28 scans are “adjusted”.

Dr Spencer I would like to ask you a direct question. Assuming that the temperature readings are only the 2 perpendicular scans – what do these “unadjusted” temperatures show?

Can you carry out such an excercise on the data, just as a matter of interest?

If there is a discrepancy between the perpendicular measurements and the “slanting adjusted” measurements – then maybe, just maybe there could be a bias in the adjusting software.

In the Artic. When looked at from above the pole, the landmass of 3 continents swamps the Arctic. 3 to 1, 4 to 1??
By all means, while the credibility of Climate Science hangs by a strand of the thinnest silk, let’s see if that line will hold up the piano’s weight.
So, Arc + NAm + Eur + Asia + NPac + NAtl = X/?
Ant + SP + SAtl + SAm + Indn + IndOc = 7/?
Jan ’10 = (X+Y) / 2
Something like that. With weights of area to each Cont/Ocean.
Surely you have paid enough attention to the events of the last 2 years to understand the need to deliver a message that is believable as well as
straightforward.

Any high school science or maths teacher can download the data and run a regression as a class exercise. It will show a warming trend in the UAH data stronger than that stated by the IPCC.

MJK (15:00:11) :

Oh dear–this latest reading does not point to a cooling world now does it?

Jay Sezbria (15:12:42) :

Well that should spell the death of the ‘global warming has ended’ meme.

vibenna (16:00:37) :

magicjava – I agree the trend estimate will be biased by heterogeneity in warm/cold events (PDO, as well as El Nino). But I don’t think that will change the underlying trend, especially given there is now 30 years of data.

BernieL:

He [Hansen] repeated this at the end of 2008:

“Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance. GISS Dec 2008.”

I hope any warmist who agrees that the trend is up and/or that a record year in 2010 is “likely” will hustle over to Intrade and take advantage of the great odds skeptics there are offering (via Intrade’s bid/asked market mechanism) for a variety of bets on those propositions. Here’s the link: https://www.intrade.com . Check under Markets –> Climate and Weather.

Here in South Africa (inland) we had overcast conditions in January almost all the time. – I have not had the air conditioner on once. So this result puzzles me a bit, especially with all that cold weather in the north.. I think Australia had some warm weather?

Actually, it occurred to me that the unusually cold temperatures this Jan across the Northern Hemisphere (as recorded by land based weather stations) suggests that an unusually large amount of cold air pushed south in the very lowest layers of the atmosphere. The relatively warm air that is usually there has to go someplace — any weatherman will tell you that the cold air displaced the warm air, rather than mixing with it like hot and cold air inside a car — so what may well have happened is that the warm air that is normally there got pushed up to 14000 feet for the satellite to measure. Once there it will cool off more than it would had it stayed near the ground, and the heat content of the atmosphere as a whole will be that much less.

Umm, can someone explain to me why running averages of 13 or 25 would be used? I understood (although stats is not my main area), that running averages of 12 or 24 months should be used, as then there is an equal number of each period in the average, ie one/two Januarys, one/two Februarys, etc.

This UAH data is useful as I’ve been wondering for the past month or so if Western Australia is the hottest land mass on the planet, at least when compared to the icy temps seemingly reported from everywhere else.

Each month my site maintains data showing the last 12 months of min and max temps at 32 locations across Western Australia compared to their averaged Bureau of Meteorology records at the beginning of the 1900s…

October 08 to September 09
min .44 C above the early 1900s
max .60 above the early 1900s

November 08 to October 09
min .39 C above the early 1900s
max .60 above the early 1900s

December 08 to November 09
min .53 C above the early 1900s
max .92 above the early 1900s

January 09 to December 09
min .59 C above the early 1900s
max 1.09 above the early 1900s

February 09 to January 2010
min .54 C above the early 1900s
max 1.16 above the early 1900s

Beginning in November, the maxima in particular went through the roof in Western Australia and the BoM notes that January had the second hottest mean temperature on record at 1.2 C above the long term average. The January maxima at some locations was up to 4 degrees C above the long term average. The UAH data above also shows a sharp jump in November for the southern hemisphere, although December doesn’t sync with the Western Australia results.

The BoM summary for January confirms that the surge in maxima coincided with well below average rainfall in central and west-south-westerly areas of Western Australia that heated the most, as was the case for the previous couple of months … i.e. it’s probably a fair assumption that the daytime temps went up because of a prolonged lack of cloud cover – along with above average SST in the Indian Ocean.

The heatwave stopped about a week ago, since when the temps have been well below the historic February averages with similar low temps forecast for the coming week.

From a broader perspective, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology monitors 26 locations across the 2.5 million square kilometres of Western Australia as part of its “high quality” (corrected) data set that is presumably the official Aussie land surface temp feed to GISS and other international organisations.

It’s worth looking at decadal averages for the same 26 locations extracted and averaged via Excel from the BoM’s “high quality” data set from 1910 to 2009:

1910-1919 – 19.56018445

1920-1929 – 19.6552

1930-1939 – 19.8408

1940-1949 – 19.7776

1950-1959 – 19.85069231

1960-1969 – 19.90246795

1970-1979 – 20.21713846

1980-1989 – 20.34732308

1990-1999 – 20.54858462

2000-2009 – 20.54797177

My reading of the BoM data is that 2000-2009 was marginally cooler than 1990-1999 across Western Australia. The BoM has nominated 2000-2009 as the hottest decade ever in Australia.

So the western half of Australia is one of the reasons the global temps were up in January despite what everybody thought was a cold northern hemisphere, but we’re not to blame for any warming over the past decade :-)

Now natural, skeptical, questions would be: Disregarding IPCC, warmists etc. Are the overall pictures from the temp series
A: Consistent with each other?…
D: Consistent with Svensmark’s hypothesis?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’d say yes to A and D.
For A: In 1999, the year following the ’98 El Nino, notice that there were four months with negative UAH temperature anomalies. In 2008, following the unusually high global temperatures in 2007, there were eight months with negative UAH anomalies.

This make you feel worse. North hemisphere warmed the most? Could possibly be due to extreme condensation, warmer clouds keeping below toward surface warmer and also radiating more upward to space. If so, would be setting up for a large drop later if both types of readings are actually accurate.

Is there an assumption that the air temperature is the land/sst temperature?
Maybe the disconnection is there.

Take the northern hemisphere: wind masses from the north bring the temperatures down while taking warm masses to the arctic. The ice does not heat, it keeps on giving its black body radiation to outer space in the long night, but the air temperature does and gives a huge anomaly to the one before the wind descended south and before the cooling ice cools the air again.

Is there any meaning in these global measures? There is a meaning in saying “this country is ten degrees cooler than last year”, from 10C it went to 0C air temperatures. The arctic gain going from -35C to -21C as can be seen in http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php is mostly meaningless since it is air and the ice is radiating away at practically a fixed rate anyway.

Maybe this gross discontinuity between the heat loss perception of people and the recorded global temperatures will bring to the fore that it is the heat gain and loss and not the temperatures that should be budgeted.

I think that the satellites should give energy balance plots: energy in energy out, if they can. It is the only way we could see if we are heating up or cooling down really.

{i}If the daily SOI index continues at the current rock bottom levels, we could end up seeing another big Kelvin wave and El Nino Modoki picking up again despite the trades not being as weak as they have been. (according to TAO).

Could this El Nino actually drop OHC farther than the one in 97/98 if this means we see this event going on a bit longer than that one? I guess then whether it goes back up depends on what ENSO will do afterwards?{/i}

A WWB is in progress for sure, but given the Western Pacific is cooler then the Central Pacific and the stronger-than-normal Peruian current, I am indeed confident that the current El Nino is peaked, and I believe that this El Nino will not linger into boreal summer. It should also be noticed that Eq 160W to 120W have cooled for almost 1 degree over the last 3 weeks, a big amount given the time of the year!

Mike J. 17:42:45 That is one of the silliest things I heard in quite some time. When you buy a thermometer do you calibrate it to all the other thermometers in the world or to you trust that the factory calibrated it when they built it. Your thermometer does not care what the thermometer at your neighbors house says.”

magicjava’s web page seem to say that satellites calibrate to 1) empty space 2) higer reference temp measured from reference source built into the satellite 3) from other satellites

Thus temperature measurement from troposphere is adjustes between space (2,7K) and reference “warm” source, and result is calibrated with data coming from other satellites + ground data.

While the price of carbon is at 10¢ a ton on the Chicago market I suggest we all buy up a few hundred tons and then when J Hansen comes looking for us we can show him we’ve already offset our carbon footprints.

NH being so warm is quite surprising, considering the North Pacific has been cold, North Atlantic not warm either – AMO index just 0,135 and here were no huge positive anomalies above ground, rather negative ones.

The group delay of an average (or any other finite symmetric weighting function) spanning T units of time is T/2, i.e., the output lags the input by half the length. Constant group delay (linear phase response) is one of the reasons your digital music system is so much clearer than the old analog gear – there is no “phase distortion.”

Therefore, to be contemporaneous, you must match up the average values with the data at time T/2 before the most recent datum in each output of the running average. That means, in this case, you can’t get an average value after 6.5 months before the current value.

I perfectly agree. Have learned much in last six months. My views have evolved. I’ve tried to get others to grasp the scale on the energy topic. Air is feeble to water when speaking heat, therefore temperature. Simple condensation is 500+ times conduction for instance, and other realizations as such. Sometimes it is easy to look at the small process, thinking you are looking at a large process, and visa-versa! As you said, all the talk about temperatures but the energy flow is the key because mass and specific heat come into play.

Actually, it occurred to me that the unusually cold temperatures this Jan across the Northern Hemisphere (as recorded by land based weather stations) suggests that an unusually large amount of cold air pushed south in the very lowest layers of the atmosphere. The relatively warm air that is usually there has to go someplace — any weatherman will tell you that the cold air displaced the warm air, rather than mixing with it like hot and cold air inside a car — so what may well have happened is that the warm air that is normally there got pushed up to 14000 feet for the satellite to measure. Once there it will cool off more than it would had it stayed near the ground, and the heat content of the atmosphere as a whole will be that much less.”

Hmm. Interesting point. What if the warm winds, which have been melting the west coast of Canada have been flowing on the top of the quite cold and heavier air in continental canada? And produce huge red area at 14 000 feet?

Is it possibe to check if the difference between surface temperatures and satellite data at those “hot regions” is greater than it usually is?

If it is – the it would quite well explain that why satellite measurement shows something thats not experienced on surface.

D. Ch. (21:46:21) :“Actually, it occurred to me that the unusually cold temperatures this Jan across the Northern Hemisphere (as recorded by land based weather stations) suggests that an unusually large amount of cold air pushed south in the very lowest layers of the atmosphere. The relatively warm air that is usually there has to go someplace — any weatherman will tell you that the cold air displaced the warm air, rather than mixing with it like hot and cold air inside a car — so what may well have happened is that the warm air that is normally there got pushed up to 14000 feet for the satellite to measure. Once there it will cool off more than it would had it stayed near the ground, and the heat content of the atmosphere as a whole will be that much less.”

I think you have a workable hypothesis here. Instead of the cold air being trapped at the north pole, some change causes it to drop south resulting in an overall drop in the energy stored in the total atmosphere.

It will be interesting to see how the MSM handle the January anomaly, as here in the UK we’re heading for the coldest winter for 20 years should the Dec/Jan pattern continue into Feb.

The public are going to ‘know’ the data is untrustworthy if the CAGW brigade try to make to much of this. Here’s the info from the infamous Met Office:-

December 2009
“Overall, it was a very cold month with mean temperatures 1.5 to 2.0 °C below the 1971-2000 normal over England and Wales, 2.0 to 2.5 °C below over Northern Ireland and 2.5 to 3.5 °C below over Scotland. Provisionally, it was the coldest December over the UK since 1995.”

January 2010
“Overall, it was a very cold month with mean temperatures 2.5 to 3.0 °C below the 1971-2000 normal over England and Wales, 2.5 °C below over most of Scotland and 2.0 to 2.5 °C below over Northern Ireland. Provisionally, it was the coldest January over the UK since 1987 and equal eighth coldest in a series from 1914.”

This is how they define winter and calculate the mean:-

“Calculate the monthly mean value at each station based on all available data (stations with too many missing observations are excluded)

Interpolate the mthly station data to a 5km grid (taking into account topography etc)

Calculate a regional average by taking the mean of all grid points within a geographical area

How we calculate seasonal averages – we take an average of the regional values for the three months that constitute the season e.g. for winter it is an average of the Dec, Jan and Feb values. Included in this final step is an allowance for the different lengths of each month i.e. slightly more weight is given to Dec and Jan (because they have 31 days) than for Feb (28 or 29 days, depending on the year).”

I’ve seen this asked before. If Dr. Spencer doesn’t answer this also here it is in simple English. It is a 13 period box filter. Like a moving average but it is the average of the point itselt plus six before and plus six after. This keeps the trend in sync with the raw data instead of lagging behind. The last six cannot be shown because you don’t know the six next points in the future!

I am skeptical of the “theory” of most warming occuring at the poles. I think this might be, possibly, because that is where the AGWers’ charts show most red. But, we also note that the fewer thermometers, the larger the red.

I am uninterested in the cooked numbers that Hansen and company produce out of GISS but rather in what the satellite data is telling us. Are the satellites telling us that the pole’s got warmer in January or that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation was responsible for the spike?

I’m quite prepared to take this data at face value, but nevertheless they do not make sense to me. How can it be that while most of the Northern hemisphere has had, and still is in, the coldest winter in a generation, the average temperature still has gone up by a big jump, unless it has been excessively hot in the rest of the world? I haven’t, apart from the usual stories from Down Under, heard anything of the kind.

Also, notice that the jump from the previous measurement is about the largest jump upwards of the whole record. I am reminded of similar glitches in the Artic temperature record last year.

Don’t know if you’re still out there listening. It seems to me pretty clear why the cold snaps, with the Tropics extra-hot and the Arctic extra-cold – three aerological units were deeply active at the same time early January. This also explains why the Arctic sea ice extent looks low at this time – more southerly warm air arriving there. But of course, it also increased precipitable potential in the Arctic, which will show up during the Summer.

The main reason the extreme conditions in early January in Scandinavia didn’t produce more of a landslide of cold records, was that the tropospheric temperatures at ca 1000m were far higher than in similar cold periods. This is consistent with the surprisingly high UAH results.

The solar activity in 2009 was at a minimum in 100 years, still 2009, when the time series is adjusted for volcanic activity and ENSO, is the hottest year on record in the GISTEMP series. (A tied second without adjustments.) Such simple adjustments are of course no kind of “final answer”, but they give indications of underlying tendencies. And, with a 30-year trend of 0.1-0.13 degC/decade in UAH, and quarterly moving averages of second half of 2009 well above that trendline, maybe the January UAH results should not be so surprising after all.

I think a lot of people may have been misled by using short-time, statistically unstable, regression slopes as “trends”. Using more appropriate methods, we need 13-15 years to establish a significant trend, and such estimates are rather stable, at 0.1-0-16 degC/decade warming. Not heeding the need for stability, it is all too easy to overestimate the trend for a period of warming when oscillations are large. If the underlying trend is somewhat stable, the next years will then probably indicate “cooling” – otherwise we would have a real change in trend.

This is what has happened over the last few years, and is also why adjusting for ElNino/LaNina events+volcanism (and maybe sun cycle) could be a good idea.

Paul Vaughan: “It’s a good deal more complicated than that – the relations don’t go away – they’re just not so easy to detect. I’m still working on cross-wavelet approaches to detection. I’m finding nonrandom (but complex) phase relations – it will take time & patience to sort the signals out.”

And then, Paul, you would have to prove that the frequency (or whatever) at which you’re finding these more complex correlations are having the same effect on climate/weather as the raw AO signal, would you not? That is, we know what the raw AO represents; does the modified signal represent the same thing?

Also, I was replying to a statement about how the AO tends to be negative during solar minimums and it clearly does not.

mmhh ok greenland and iceland are really warm this winter
but a +0.841 anomaly for the nothern hemisphere, that cant be right
that would be the warmerst januari in at least 30 years .. while in the whole of europe its at least the coldest jan in 13 years (en the eastern part even the coldest in 25 years) US and azia were cold and russia is was on average colder than normal.
the North. Altlantic is colder as well…

I’m concerned for the people who post stuff like “I’ve got snow in my backyard this winter, so these figures for the whole planet must be wrong”. Surely both sceptics and warmists can see the dumbness of that kind of statement? I offer this video to demonstrate the difference in scale.

The AO is affected by more than just the level of solar activity. It is a balance between solar and oceanic effects so there does not need to be a short term or even cycle by cycle solar correlation.

Furthermore our records of AO intensity are not long.

Instead of seeking a correlation I look at basic principles and recent SABER satellite results that I have referred you to before.

It seems that when the sun is more active (on average over long time scales) there is a faster loss of energy to space so the AO would tend positive.

With a slower energy loss to space the AO would tend negative.

The reason being that with a faster release of convective energy from warmer ocean surfaces combined with resistance to the ejection of that energy from the contracted atmosphere (which then has a smaller surface area capable of outward radiation) then the polar high pressure cells would become stronger and move equatorward causing a more negative AO.

The extra energy from the El Nino would have been diverted back downward within the air circulation system instead of being pumped more quickly to space as would happen if the sun were more active with an expanded atmosphere and a larger radiating surface area.

That’s exactly what we see when such as this winter we get warm equatorial ocean surfaces with a quiet sun.

The counterintuitive point is that the effect of those variations in the size of the atmosphere’s radiating surface area is apparently greater than the variations in the sun’s absolute power output which conveniently squares with Leif’s objections to a substantial direct solar impact on climate.

To oppose this line of thinking you need to deal with the SABER observation that when the sun’s surface is more active the atmosphere loses energy to space faster.

Surface measurements are done ~1.5 from the surface. Satellites are measuring several thousand feet above the surface which obviously is colder than the surface. How is the baseline (.146 for HadCRUT and .238 for GISS) then in any way related to the difference in raw temperature?

Hadley, GISS and UAH/RSS calculate anomalies relative to different base periods. What this means is they take the average monthly temperature for a defined period and from that they calculate the recent monthly anomaly. For example Hadley use the 1961-1990 period. The most recent Hadley anomaly was +0.41 for December 2009. This means that, according to Hadley data, December 2009 was 0.41 deg warmer than the average 1961-1990 December temperature during. Ok so far?

The problem for comparison is that they don’t all use the same base period. GISS use 1951-1980 and UAH & RSS use 1979-1998 (note the first satellite readings were in Dec 1978). Because the 1950s and 1960s were generally colder than the 1980s and 1990s this means that the GISS and Hadley anomalies will be higher than the satellite anomalies (GISS in particular). A way round this is to use the same base period, i.e. 1979-1998, for all 4 metrics.

Using your figures: Hadley data suggests that the average temperature for the 1979-1998 period is 0.146 deg higher than it is for the 1961-1990 period and the GISS data suggests that the average temperature for the 1979-1998 period is 0.238 deg higher than it is for the 1951-1980 period. Though, it should be noted that these are overall averages and that the monthly averages will vary slightly. Therefore, when plotting, the above values are often used as ‘offsets’ to standardise the base periods and so provide a truer comparison. As a very, very rough guide; if you subtract ~0.24 from the GISS anomaly it should give you an approximate value for the expected UAH anomaly (but I repeat monthly values will vary ).

As far as raw temperatures are concerned, these are not really relevant. We’re simply looking at the change in temperature. For example, if the 1979-98 average temperature of the lower troposphere is 252 K (i.e.-21 deg C) and it ‘s now 252.5 K then there is an increase of 0.5 K. Similarly, if the surface was 287 K (i.e. 14 deg C) in 1979-98 and now it’s 287.5 there is also an increase of 0.5 K. That would probably be seen as consistent.
In fact, the trends in all 4 metrics are remarkably consistent despite what you might reads sometimes. There are obviously blips from time to time due to slightly different methods of a analysis and there are different lag times in response to ENSO events, but all 4 have warmed at virtually the same rate over the past 20 years.

I might have made a bit of a mess of this but, reading it myself, I can’t really tell. Just to reinforce the main point:-

In other words, suppose all temperature products have the same anomaly reported, making them “in good agreement”. How can this be when temperature generally decreases with height?

Because the anomaly indicates the change in temperature NOT the raw temperature.

“I agree. There is nothing exceptionally warm or strong about this El Nino.”

Correct. However, if you look at global SSTs, I think you’ll see the reason January is so warm is there is a HUGE warm pool in the south Pacific, unassociated with any El Nino region, and the Atlantic seems to be warmer than normal. Add it all up, and I’d wager there might be another “warmest month ever for the oceans” articles soon….

And we cannot believe this is the warmest January ever when the bulk of the N. Hemisphere OBSERVED a colder winter than has been seen in quite some time.

No. The part of the world inhabited by most readers of this blog observed a “colder winter than has been seen in quite some time”.

Incredible. Despite using different sources, we’ve got both RSS and UAH reporting record anomalies for January – and despite the fact that both have been operating (successfully if previous posts are anything to go by) for 32 years. Yet I’ve noticed a number of posters cite 6 years of ARGO data as though it’s results were carved in stone. Woe betide ARGO it it starts to show any ocean warming.

John Finn: “but all 4 have warmed at virtually the same rate over the past 20 years ”
Yes, but looking the 1980-2009 trends for GISS and UAH, the UAH rate is somewhat slower. Contradicting hypotheses about the troposphere warming faster than the surface.

Which simply may indicate that transport phenomena are more important than we thought – typically, UAH reacts more to strong El Nino episodes than GISS.

Also, transport, or rather lack thereof, probably plays a large role in the current record UAH anomaly. If one doesn’t like global warming, the recent weather pattern may be about the worst that could happen. It is like shutting off the heating in some rooms during cold nights: They cool, but the average indoor temp you can have with a given amount of heating increases this way, so it’s economical. (Just look at the radiative balance at +5 and -20 degC: A lot less heat than normal has been lost from the NH cold ares this winter.) And if this weather pattern becomes more normal, which is not unlikely – we have had quite a few similar episodes in recent years, it may actually speed up global warming.

I live in Pretoria. Suppose like you people, I want to know the avg temp. for a month, but not for the whole world, I just want to know for Pretoria
1) where do I put the thermometer? Different valleys or hills & other places give all different temps. How would one get the right place that really represents Pretoria?
2) Who calibrates the thermometer? How do I know this is all done right?
3) How do I determine the avg for the month? Do I have a recorder that plots every temp. of every minute of the month and does the computer give the avg? How was that done 100 years ago??

Stephen Wilde: You wrote with respect to my comment in which I showed that there was no correlation between the AO and the solar cycle, “Again Bob you don’t have a broad enough or long enough perspective,” but then you confirmed what I had written with, “The AO is affected by more than just the level of solar activity. It is a balance between solar and oceanic effects so there does not need to be a short term or even cycle by cycle solar correlation.”

To clarify, you wrote, and I responded to, “As I have said elsewhere a quiet sun seems to reduce energy loss to space by encouraging a more negative Arctic Oscillation.”

And I provided you with a graph that compared the Arctic Oscillation and scaled sunspot numbers to show that the Arctic Oscillation has been positive or negative or neutral during periods of a quiet sun (solar minimums).

Now you attempt to redirect the conversation with “It is a balance between solar and oceanic effects so there does not need to be a short term or even cycle by cycle solar correlation.”

If there is no, as you write, “short term or even cycle by cycle solar correlation,” then you confirm your initial comment was wrong. In other words, if, as you wrote, “there does not need to be a short term or even cycle by cycle solar correlation,” then you can’t write that, “a quiet sun seems to reduce energy loss to space by encouraging a more negative Arctic Oscillation.” They contradict one another.

You then attempted to introduce a time factor, writing, “Furthermore our records of AO intensity are not long.”

If the AO does not correlate with the solar cycle over the past 60 years, would you expect it to improve over a longer term? And if it did, there is still a lack of correlation over the short term which contradicts what you’d written originally. And if you do not have access to longer AO records, you have no knowledge of any longer term relationship, so why introduce it, other than to muddy the waters?

And with respect to the Saber Project article you link, the project started in 2002 and the article was written in 2008. That’s six years, about half of a solar cycle, and you complain to me that the AO data is too short? There’s no consistency in your reply, Stephen.

Henry@SteveE
Initially I also believed that carbondioxide was a cause for climate change as its properties to absorb heat are well documented.
However, the fundamental argument of AGW theory is that this trace gas (at slightly less than 0.04% or 400 ppm) is THE key ingredient to controlling a massively complex system such as climate. It increased by less than 0.01% during the past 50 years.
We are asked essentially to dismiss the effects of solar variation, orbital changes, cosmic rays, magnetic field changes, or many other variables and their inter- realationships. A main component of air, namely water vapor (average 1% in air and which is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2), is completely ignored. (all processes including nuclear and rocket fuel produce water vapor)
The argument that CO2 is a cause for warming is absurd.

Your answer still does not answer the question. I understand what an anomaly is.

The “trend” can be identical yet one product can still be in error in amplitude depending on the initial conditions and changes between the end points of the data. This is easily provable.

You cited UAH and GIStemp agreeing with each other for the U.S., yet if you examine the 30 years of data, GIStemp clearly diverged greatly from UAH from 95-01. Look at global temps as well. GISS makes the past colder and the present decade warmer, yet the trends are “similar”.

As satellite was not available 70 years ago, there is no way to evaluate initial conditions from that period to determine if the last thirty 30 years trend is meaningful in terms of correlation between the two products.

Also, as I understand it, the LT should be warming at a faster rate than the surface to begin with, correct? In fact, the opposite is the case.

I think too much emphasis is placed on long term trends without considering what happens between the end points.

Henry Poole, first of all it is irrelevant that Co2 is a trace gas, it’s climatological effects are greatly disproportionate to it’s percentage amount of the atmosphere.

Secondly, it has increased by far more than 0.01% in the past 50 years. In 1950 Co2 was at around 270-280ppm in the atmosphere, today it is approaching 390ppm, an increase of around 40%.

Thirdly, you are asked to ignore all the other main drivers of climate because these things have been more or less static, or have at least not been significantly anomalous to the extent that they could be the cause of the observed warming. Co2 levels have not been static.

Water vapor is completely ignored because first of all, we are not pumping water vapor into the atmosphere that has been out of the system for millions of years as fossil fuels, thus it is not accumulating in the atmosphere in greater amounts, and also because water vapor actually falls back out of the sky as rain, and doesn’t stay there for hundreds and hundreds of years like Co2 does.

There’s no evidence as you would put it that the theory of evolution is true. We can’t run and expriment and test it as it occurs over a much longer time scale than we can observe. That doesn’t mean it wrong though.

I guess you can not argue that it is warmer at 14,000 ft above sea level. I mean, how many population centers or surface temperature stations are there at 14K.

Satellite data does not lie, only man made algorithms and adjustments can do that. And calibrated thermometers on board a satellite stay calibrated for the life of the satellite and prove what, that the temperatures being directly measured on board are accurate?

More important, what does a temperature anomaly of 0.72 deg at 14,000 ft mean to heat at the surface. Given the lower density, an equivalent heat increase at the surface equals a temperature increase of 0.36 deg.

I have to imagine that cloud variability at this altitude has to be adjusted for. How accurate are these adjustments.

The data is spliced from many different satellites over 30 years, so I guess intercalibration of the various satellites data is a possible issue.

In any event, when data does not match observation, it should be questioned.

None of this means squat anyways, the issue is not whether we are warming or cooling, but is more to do with what is causing it. Natural variation or mans CO2?.

An enhanced greenhouse effect from CO2 has been confirmed by multiple lines of empirical evidence. Satellite measurements of infrared spectra over the past 40 years observe less energy escaping to space at the wavelengths associated with CO2. Surface measurements find more downward infrared radiation warming the planet’s surface. This provides a direct, empirical causal link between CO2 and global warming.

I have yet to see anything in the way of a sampling strategy for these temperature reconstructions. Specifically, a sampling strategy which ensures these signals are not aliased.

This point covers both spatial and temporal aliasing. I feel slightly more relaxed about the temporal sampling frequency, but very uncomfortable about spatial sampling and the scope for aliasing across each sample of the temperature field.

Design of a sampling regime needs to kick off with a detailed survey of the temperature field and to determine the temporal and spatial “bandwidth”. Theoretically, we can sample at a minimum of twice the bandwidth, but in practice the sampling rate needs to be about 10 times the bandwidth.

Until this quenstion is convincingly answered, my inclination is to dismiss all trends in the global temperature reconstructions as being unreliable and possibly completely misleading.

A nasty feature of aliasing is that it can produce a plausible-looking signal. And averaging does not help – there is not a lot of purpose in taking the average value of a signal which has been completely distorted by aliasing.

This is not a question of statistical sampling error. It is firmly in the realms of discrete signal processing, and is well based in mathematics.

MattN said: “Correct. However, if you look at global SSTs, I think you’ll see the reason January is so warm is there is a HUGE warm pool in the south Pacific, unassociated with any El Nino region, and the Atlantic seems to be warmer than normal. Add it all up, and I’d wager there might be another “warmest month ever for the oceans” articles soon….”

Is this extra warmth upwelling from the deep or a lack of convection cooling by the atmosphere?(Through cold air being parked over land)

John Finn: “but all 4 have warmed at virtually the same rate over the past 20 years ”
Yes, but looking the 1980-2009 trends for GISS and UAH, the UAH rate is somewhat slower. Contradicting hypotheses about the troposphere warming faster than the surface.

The UAH warmed at a lower rate than all other datasets between before 1990. That is true. Whether that’s a problem with UAH or the other datasets is not clear. You are correct that the very close agreement contradicts the troposphere amplification hypothesis for the time being .

Which simply may indicate that transport phenomena are more important than we thought – typically, UAH reacts more to strong El Nino episodes than GISS.

I accept that UAH responds more sharply (and a bit later) to ENSO hence we sometimes get ‘mismatches’ in the anomalies. With this in mind, though, I don’t know why people don’t accept that the surface may sometimes be more sensitive to certain events than the troposphere and that GISS readings may be genuine and not ‘fudged’ to show warming.

My main point is that if GISS were really fudging data to show warming they’re not doing a particularly good job.

Would that mean there will be a precipitous drop in temps by the end of the year as happened after the peak in el Nino in 98?
”
Peak of El Nino, at the moment, so when it subsides such as after 1998 and 2007, we will see a BIG drop in global temperatures as measured by UAH due to a La Nina.

My understanding is that El Nino is the upper layers of the Pacific ocean giving out heat to the atmosphere. This heat will disssipate into space and sharp cooling after that will occur.

Don’t panic folks, EL Nino is just weather, it is PDO and solar activity that drive the climate. And the long term trend for those is down.

There are several reasons why certain ares of the planet were cooler than might be expected during this warm El Nino. Here’s a couple:

1) Blocking high pressure systems have kept cool air patterns across much of the US and Europe.

2) The addition snow cover provides it’s own cooling effect. When warm air does return to these areas, it cools, condenses into fog or low clouds and limits the daily highs from reaching levels they might reach without snow cover. While the lows remain warm most people don’t associate the lows with how warm it is.

Also keep in mind that the UAH surface readings were also high for January which calls into question the theory that the warm air was pushed upward.

Like I said before, this event is a great learning experience and some real clever scientists have a chance to learn more about our complex climate system. We shall see if this happens.

I hope someone computes a land only anomaly for last month from GISS or HadCru. If it actually does show the cooling as most people seem to think, that means there’s a real question about the historic record and whether it has any meaning relative to Earth’s total energy.

It’s fortunate for some areas that there is warmth & El Nino. The SW US is getting badly needed precip that prb’ly wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. California, NM, Arizona and west Texas should consider themselves lucky.

Well, reading through this thread just proves to me that no-one has the foggiest idea how this weather and temperature thingy works. All speculation and guesswork. Here in Cape Town we seem to have had a very mild summer/January. Some deciduous trees appear to be already donning autumn colours, which seems way too soon. I have needed the AC in my home office (normally a sauna at this time of the year) only once or twice. My daughter in UK has had scary cold weather, as has much of the northern hemisphere. Does anyone have any idea where exactly have sufficiently warm temperatures been recorded on the ground to offset all the cold? Seems to me this temperature measurement is just totally unrelated to what happens on the ground. Quite frankly, I trust it no more than any off the other questionable “science” that has been thrust down our throats of late.

The El Nino would seem clearly to have waned in the sectors closest to the South American coast, with small spots of blue now appearing. The current Nino-ish anaomaly is more concentrated in the 3,4 sectors. Further south, the ‘hot spot’ mid-ocean, directly west of the coast of Chile seems to have diffused and abated somewhat. In general, there seems to be more blue appearing.

Does this represent the atmosphere’s delayed reaction to the build-up of heat in the tropical Pacific?

Joe Bastardi of AccuWeather uses such steep negative spikes in the SOI as teleconnecting, in winter, to a strong southern jet over North America. Given a negative AO and NAO, and a pool of tapable Arctic air, you have an ideal scenario for major snowstorms in the eastern U.S.

Unfortunately, for a weather weenie in the NYC area, this means the disappointment of seeing storm after storm concentrate its glory a hundred miles to your south. This is about to happened with the latest in the train. When the last flake is measured Washington, D.C. may be snowier this winter than Boston.

There is 70% of the ocean by area,where most of the El-Nino is from.While the 30% of the land surface has unusually favorable blocking patterns that funnel cold air farther south than usual,mostly staying on the continental areas.

I do not think Dr. Spenser’s data release for January is bad,just indicative of a strong release of energy from the ocean (it is cooling because of it).

We should all know better than to read too much into a single month’s global temperature data point. On a month to month basis, the data is very noisy. But smoothed out, over time, there is a clear and indisputable pattern of natural climate variation in which global temperature rates of change rise and fall on a decadal time scale. So I think it would be of interest to know where we are with respect to this decadal climate cycle. Are we in the early part of an ascending phase, so that we might expect temperatures to demonstrate a tendency to keep on rising, or are we nearing the end of one, in which case we can expect the rate of temperature increase to moderate, and then begin to decline?

I think the answer is very clear from the following graph:

This is a graph of the HadCRUT3 monthly global temperature anomaly, seasonally differenced, and then smoothed. The approximately decadal cycles are clear and indisputable (even if they vary in terms of frequency and amplitudes). The last trough occurred in September of 2006. The (approximately) decadal cycles have an average frequency of 110.8 months. For a ballpark guesstimate, figure 55 months from last trough to peak, and that moves us out to April 2011, or about 15 months from now.

So expect the current warming cycle to begin to moderate over the next year, and then start back down.

“Mutt, these folks sure like to talk and worry about nothing. Don’t they?”

“Jeff, they’re bored and have nothing better to do.”

“Mutt, why are some of them more worried than the rest?”

“That’s easy Jeff, the people who are most worried think the satellite is telling them something important. The people who aren’t worried know the thing is just telling them something.”

“Mutt?”

“Yes, Jeff”

“Want to go get something to eat at the Dinner?”

“No, Jeff. There’s a Nor’easter out there that’s going to knock the city’s socks off. Let’s have some fun and order a pizza, we’ll bet on how long it takes the kid to get here. The one off by the most pays for the pie. OK?”

As Mr. Spock would say “Fascinating”. What this really shows is that we really don’t know as much about how the climate works as we think we do. I just finished a book by Arnd Bernaerts about the warming in the Arctic between 1919 and 1939. What stood out was that during this time of warming, the southern oceans, Indian Ocean and Atlantic actually cooled. Records of the past suggest that periods of “cooling” have been associated with stormy, extreme weather in Northern America and Eurasia but I haven’t found much on the proxy records of the oceans during these climate shifts like the cooling episodes of the “Little Ice Age”. One of the benefits of the AGW hysteria has been the development of the network of monitors (land based CRU, NOAA and GISS temps currently excepted) that allow us to observe temperatures, sea levels, clouds, ice etc. Only with accurate data over a period of time and minds open to the observations can we say we understand our climate.

There is 70% of the ocean by area,where most of the El-Nino is from.While the 30% of the land surface has unusually favorable blocking patterns that funnel cold air farther south than usual,mostly staying on the continental areas.

I do not think Dr. Spenser’s data release for January is bad,just indicative of a strong release of energy from the ocean (it is cooling because of it). In all this there is obviously no discernible AGW effect going on.

Calm down.

Yes, I agree that what you say is probably true. But why not state where the heat is coming from and confirm your (and my) analysis? Leaving the statement the way it stands opens the door to the propagandist.

“There’s no evidence as you would put it that the theory of evolution is true.”

Of course there is. I recall a paper in Science [IIRC], showing pictures of black moths whose ancestors were white to match the color of the tree trunks they spent a lot of time on. The moths turned black through natural selection because of the heavy use of coal, which turned the tree trunks very dark grey, making the white moths easy targets for predators.

I also recall experiments done with bacteria showing the effects of natural selection. And Charles Darwin took copious notes on his observations of the effects of evolution by natural selection.

Smokey (07:43:11) :
SteveE (05:01:31) :“There’s no evidence as you would put it that the theory of evolution is true.”
Of course there is.
Evolution is a fact by now. Just like ‘Continental Drift’ [aka Plate Tectonics], Expansion of the Universe, Relativity, 4.5 billion year old Earth, etc. All the facts that pseudo-scientist and assorted nuts are unaware of or denying. Let’s call them ‘fact deniers’.

“Suzanne (07:41:27) :
[…]
One of the benefits of the AGW hysteria has been the development of the network of monitors ”

Not really. Networks like Argo are becoming technologically feasible due to the development of microcontrollers and cheaper fabrication technologies. Without the IPCC fraudsters we would have much more of that already because they dumped most of the money that was given to them into useless GCM’s.

That’s true, I remember seeing the same paper now you come to mention it.

If you want observational evidence how about my earlier post:

“Satellite measurements of infrared spectra over the past 40 years observe less energy escaping to space at the wavelengths associated with CO2. Surface measurements find more downward infrared radiation warming the planet’s surface. This provides a direct, empirical causal link between CO2 and global warming.”

Well, I’ve already done a back of the envelop quantification of my expectation. Are you wanting me to bet on it? I’m not sure that you can compare my “forecast” with Tamino’s. I’m not saying anything about the trend, per se. I’m talking about predictable cycles, or changes, in the trend. More crudely, perhaps, I’m talking about whether the data points are tending to fall above or below the trend line. Right now, they are falling above it. Before long, they will fall below it. That is a bet that is impossible to lose. The only uncertainty is in how long it will be before they begin to fall back below the trend line.

Is skepticism only reserved for empirically-observable networks scattered around the surface of the Earth? Satellite systems still require engineers to build them, computer scientists to program them, aeronautical experts to keep them in precise orbit, and ultimately a climate scientist to read and interpret their data. A lot of people are involved, and (with great respect for their advanced degrees) people make mistakes. If we can’t get accelerator linkages and brake systems to function here on Earth, how can we conceive of a flawlessly operating system in space where conditions are much more harsh?

Scientists in these programs can address questions of a skeptical nature.

Sorry, I I just can’t buy it. The northern hemisphere has been very very cold (except western Canada), some countries the coldest for 100 years and yet the Satellites show the NH as the highest Plus Anomoly?
Andes Colder, South Africa Colder, New Zealand (despite the adjusted temps showing otherwise) colder, the Oceans cooling.
Obviously Human observation is useless and Calculated Temperatures form Satellites are right when measuring temperatures.

How The Satellite Calibration Is Done:
(to the best that I can figure it out)

1. What actually takes the readings that end up reported is the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU).

2. For onboard calibration, AMSU measures a high and a low temperature. With both those temperatures known by other means, it can be checked if AMSU has reported those temperatures correctly. This is done once every Earth scan.

3. For the low number, AMSU measures empty space, the “cosmic background view,” which is assumed to be 2.7 Kelvin. I will presume a “reality check” is also done, where if AMSU reports something widely different from the expected 2.7K on the recheck then an error flag gets set.

4. For the high number, AMSU measures a “warm calibration target” onboard the satellite. The temperature of the target is continuously measured by precise platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs). The reading from AMSU is checked against the PRT readings.

5. The start of the calibration, the primary referencing, was done back in the lab on Earth. The PRT’s were carefully calibrated to a laboratory standard. Once on the satellite and in orbit, the PRT’s have to hold their calibration and reliably monitor the warm calibration target. Needless to say, the calibration of the PRT’s are not rechecked against the original laboratory standard.

6. Thus AMSU can be trusted as long as the PRT’s can be trusted. Multiple PRT’s are used to detect if one or more go bad by looking for abnormal readings compared to the rest. The accuracy of AMSU is verified by comparing its readings to those from weather balloons.

Going from lab to PRT to AMSU, there is a loss of accuracy compared to making the readings with direct comparison to a laboratory standard. But as Dr. Spencer reported, with everything figured together “…the absolute accuracy of the calibrated Earth-viewing temperatures are probably not much better than 1 deg. C.” What is desired for satellite use is a system that is rugged and will keep working for many years, and the long-observed relationship is that as precision and accuracy goes up so to does fragility. As long as we are mostly looking for trends and AMSU is consistent in its readings, it can be trusted.

No. The part of the world inhabited by most readers of this blog observed a “colder winter than has been seen in quite some time”.
Incredible.

You got that last part right. An incredible credibility problem. The Observations were NOT confined to this blog, nor did they exclusively originate here. And it goes downhill rapidly from there, people across the world were paying attention.

So, this is what it is: Climate Science has one heck of a reputation problem right now. Do you really expect to be able to nonchalantly toss out another ‘warmest ever’ leaned up against a heavily damaged GISS/CRU or HadCRUT data set – AND – have it go unchallenged??

Bad idea of the 21st century.
Really a bad idea.
My guess is that there are those who cannot be dissuaded and are itching to get the report off. Discretionary caution would be the better part of valour here. Apparently lost in the shuffle. So be it.

Let me take a bask at quoting Warmist GobbledyGook, “Global Warming can cause cooling events, because the warm water shifts currents, leaving certain land masses without their ‘warming protection’, this should not misconstrued as Global cooling, it’s a symptom of Warming….”

Well, now we have Cold records covering N America, UK, Mainland Europe, Asia (remember China’s Ports), and we have Ocean temps being reported as warmer. I know Australia isn’t hotter than normal this summer – the Aussy Open was chilly and variable alot of rain over 2 weeks of the month… Where is all that warm water going and which land masses are being blankets by it’s heat?

Atmospheric temps at 36,000 ft. are currently what would be expected around mid-June. This anamoly bodes well for making 2010 the warmest on record, and with the solar cycle 24 maximum still ahead of us a few years, things will only go up up up…as CO2 and Methane levels continue in the same direction…

John Finn:
“I accept that UAH responds more sharply (and a bit later) to ENSO hence we sometimes get ‘mismatches’ in the anomalies. With this in mind, though, I don’t know why people don’t accept that the surface may sometimes be more sensitive to certain events than the troposphere and that GISS readings may be genuine and not ‘fudged’ to show warming.

My main point is that if GISS were really fudging data to show warming they’re not doing a particularly good job.”

Sure. Which is why I like to plot the UAH and GISS together, both with a 12-60 month moving average. Best with longer periods, to eliminate most of ENSO etc. Discard one – and you should really also discard the other. And they are obtained quite independently. I like to stress the somewhat smaller trend in UAH – even if they are virtually identical 1990-2009 – to point to some problematic parts of climatic modeling: According to most theories, it should be greater. But it is a logical fallcay to conclude that AGW is refuted.

That’s way too general a statement. In some particulars it’s true, and in others false, and in others just pure speculation. In fact, it rests on the same kinds of inferences, like CO2 temp correlations, that are now being shown to be false. Specifically, while there are many conjectures and alleged examples, close scrutiny reveals that the hypothesis of random mutations conferring a net positive advantage to any organism has never been shown to be correct. And, where anymore in the reviewed literature does anyone claim that life arose from dead matter? You want examples of nutters? How about Crick and Hoyle, who, knowing the impossibility of life arising by chance, postulated that it came from space? Never mind that the statistics that say life couldn’t have arisen in 4.5 billion years, also say it couldn’t have arisen in 15 (actually a lot less, as the ingredients hadn’t even been made in the stars yet).

So, as you have stated it, no it isn’t a fact, and won’t be until they find clear unequivocal and evidence that what they postulate can occur, and often enough to be the vehicle for the changes the POSTULATE occurred that way.

The data flow for a microwave temperature sounder unit is basically as follows:

1) The sounder is a directional antenna that views things at several frequencies. These frequencies are located in the oxygen absorption complex from 50-70 GHz. Its easier to use the lower edge so they are usually in the 50 GHz area.

2) The sounder also views the earth in a “window” channel away from molecular absorption lines and usually also at the 21.235 GHz water vapor absorption line.

3) The sounder also views an on board calibration object whose temperature is known via direct measurement.

4) The amount of emission at the various frequencies is downloaded to the earth. This is known in the trade as the “Brightness Temperature” and is what is displayed on the RSS web site.

5) To convert the brightness temperatures to temperatures at a given pressure is fun and games time. It involves assumptions on the reflectivity of the surface and there are a number of methods that have been used over time. Since the brightness temperature is the integral of the physical temperature, the strength of the absorption line, the reflectivity of the surface and some other random things, you can basically assume that a temperature at a given pressure level (say 500 mb) is an approximation to what is really at that level. If you can get within a degree C or so of a radiosonde (which has its own set of problems) you are doing fairly well. However, when the instrument is operating correctly, an increase or decrease in the brightness temperature of a channel is basically indicative of an increase or decrease in the temperature of the atmosphere in and around the peak of the weighting function of the channel.

You can also tease out various other things from the brightness temperatures. Since the reflectivity of a rough ocean with lots of foam is different than the reflectivity of a smooth ocean, you can get some gross idea as to the wind speed at the surface. Likewise, the reflectivity of snow/ice is different than that of bare soil. You usually tease those out with your “window” channel.

Bottom line, things are not exact, but you can get a good idea of the global temperature distribution with these beasts. They work over land, sea, and ice. However, they are not surface penetrating. The ocean temperatures they compute are the surface temperatures, not the Argo temperatures at depth.

“Satellite measurements of infrared spectra over the past 40 years observe less energy escaping to space at the wavelengths associated with CO2. Surface measurements find more downward infrared radiation warming the planet’s surface. This provides a direct, empirical causal link between CO2 and global warming.”

Sorry, but it only shows correlation. There can be alternate causes. Here’s one: click

That link is out of date; the Sun is not radiating as strongly now. [Leif can correct me regarding anything Solar.] But you can see the rigor necessary in climate science, now that such monumental corruption has been exposed.

Much more scrutiny of CO2 claims is now necessary because of the deceit and professional misconduct exposed in the East Anglia emails and the Harry-read_me file.

Climate scientists have admitted in their emails that they simply fabricated large swathes of data. They also state that they made up the data to conform to their climate model expectations.

They also adjusted raw data, then discarded the raw data so their adjustments cannot be validated. They still refuse to ‘open the books’ to scientific skeptics, claiming they have agreements [that they have not produced], while giving the same purportedly confidential information to their friends.

So now everything claimed about the effect of carbon dioxide on the planet’s temperature and climate must be rigorously backed by real evidence, not by learned opinions expressed in the climate peer review literature, or in the output of GCMs. All of that is suspect now, all of it, and it is essentially worthless.

If the scientists had unimpeachable reputations, then some leeway could be allowed. But there is no one who argues that CO2 will lead to catastrophic AGW who can now be trusted. There are no doubt some honest climate scientists who believe sincerely that CO2 will lead to runaway global warming, but as a group they have all been tainted, or corrupted outright, by money and status — deliberately in many cases, by NGOs, by politicians and their staffs, and by wealthy foundations with a heavy pro-AGW agenda. And of course, by the hero status accorded them by an uncritical, unquestioning and fawning media.

Nor can most climate journals be trusted, now that it is clear that rather than publishing scientifically valid points of view, they act as gatekeepers at the beck and call of the same climate scientists, by placing alarmist referees in coveted positions, by excessively long publication delays, or more often, by barring outright papers skeptical of AGW, while publishing alarmist submissions with alacrity.

It is an unfortunate situation, but unless and until there is full and complete cooperation by these same purveyors of the CO2=AGW hypothesis, including the sharing of all data, methodologies, algorithms, notes and experiments, and anything else requested by skeptical scientists that is related to the hypothesis, then the presumption must be made that the climate alarmists are still being deceitful, and that their conclusions cannot withstand open scientific scrutiny.

They brought this terrible situation on themselves, and now they are reaping what they have sown. Scientists in other disciplines, which have been starved of funding because of the ongoing AGW scare, should rise up in furious indignation at the result: the public is beginning to distrust all scientists as money grubbing publicity hounds. That is not fair to the large majority of honest scientists, who are the victims of the Michael Manns, Phil Joneses and Wei-Chyung Wangs, just as much as the taxpayers are.

Leif Svalgaard (07:53:39):
Smokey (07:43:11):
SteveE (05:01:31:There’s no evidence as you put it that the theory of evolution is true
Of course there is.
Evolution is a fact by now.

Evolution always was a (complex) fact. An account whose name I can’t recall offhand put this very well. To wit, Darwin’s task in The Origin was two-fold: to collect and assess the evidence supporting the fact of evolution and to propose a theoretical explanation, based primarily on natural selection. (Incidentally, the famous observations and experiments on industrial melanism in moths are evidence for the operation of natural selection in the real-world, but don’t bear on the fact of evolution [which involves speciation] directly.) Darwin didn’t provide a very adequate explanation for speciation itself, but Mayr’s work on geographic isolation has, I think, largely filled this (theoretical) gap.

Exactly what part of the world contributed to it? It wasn’t Europe, or North America or China, or Mexico, or Russia… So, where was it? I want to see a break down into smaller areas so it’s source can be found. If it isn’t all the extra cold areas, then there must be some spot, or spots, that is/are much hotter than usual.

Just a single number tells me nothing, especially since the concept of global average temperature makes no more sense than a global average wind velocity.

Sorry, I ain’t buyin it. As far as I’m concerned that satellite is just space junk.

Given that we are experiencing an El Nino, it is not that surprising that the global temperature has increased and it will be interesting to see whether it peaks at less than the 98 temperature. However, I am surprised by the NH temp given the extensive record snows over record areas. I guess that the high NH temperature must be due to sea temps.

“The findings, based on interviews carried out on 3-4 February, show that only 26% of people think “climate change is happening and is now established as largely man-made”, only 1% more than those who think there is no global warming.”

Of interest too is the list of key stories on the right of the page – none of them positive but going back some months (the Phil Jones story was his initial stepping down last year).

“[JR: Try googling his name at WattsUp. He is doing anti-science. Please read my link. As RC noted, “Now, there’s nothing wrong with making mistakes when pursuing an innovative observational method, but Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong. They did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess, as has now been done.”

As I noted, Amazingly (or not), the “serial errors in the data analysis” all pushed the (mis)analysis in the same, wrong direction. Coincidence? You decide. But I find it hilarious that the deniers and delayers still quote Christy/Spencer/UAH analysis lovingly, but to this day dismiss the “hockey stick” and anything Michael Mann writes, when his analysis was in fact vindicated by the august National Academy of Sciences in 2006.”

The reporter introducing the BBC’s new poll results was of course Roger Harrabin and when asked what was causing the increased scepticism replied that one factor was the IPCC getting one of their facts wrong – and mentioned Glaciergate.

What an ace reporter! How long have the other slips been in the public domain? Even the Telegraph’s Louise Gray mentioned one or two errors yesterday.

This is a long blog and its probably too late in the day for this post from a non-scientist to receive much attention. Also its a little off topic.

Is climate a cybernetic system? Is the goal of this system to provide over time, but not necessarily in lockstep, a constant relationship between the various climatic elements?

Read no further if you do not believe climate is a cybernetic system, but please feel free to give all the benefit of your opinion.

Cybernetic systems are controlled by feedback. How successful have climate scientists been in identifying the feedback which has corrected the earth’s tendencies to cool on the one hand and heat on the other over time? For example, is there an agreed and accepted understanding of the feedback condition which brought to an end the respective ice ages?

My concern is that because the feedback which causes climate to change may not be understood it is not reflected in any modeling. Accordingly when the current trend is for the temperature to increase, the predictions from the models can only produce constant increases in the future, and vice versa.

DR (04:52:54) :
@John Finn
Your answer still does not answer the question. I understand what an anomaly is.
You were asking about “raw temperatures” . I’m now not sure what your question is. You appera The “trend” can be identical yet one product can still be in error in amplitude depending on the initial conditions and changes between the end points of the data. This is easily provable.
Try plotting the data (with the appropriate offset). I don’t think the amplitude is too different. I’m not sure what you mean by initial conditions. You cited UAH and GIStemp agreeing with each other for the U.S., yet if you examine the 30 years of data, GIStemp clearly diverged greatly from UAH from 95-01. Look at global temps as well. GISS makes the past colder and the present decade warmer, yet the trends are “similar”.
What do you mean “GISS makes the past colder and the present decade warmer”. Warmer than what? Warmer than UAH? What do you mean? As satellite was not available 70 years ago, there is no way to evaluate initial conditions from that period to determine if the last thirty 30 years trend is meaningful in terms of correlation between the two products.
I’m still not sure what you mean. If GISS and UAH have a similar warming trend over the past 20-30 years then I don’t really see what that has to do with the 30 or 40 years before that. I still don’t know what you mean by initial conditions. You need to explain exactly what you mean. Also, as I understand it, the LT should be warming at a faster rate than the surface to begin with, correct? In fact, the opposite is the case.
There is a hypothesis which suggests that the troposphere should warm, on average, about 1.2 times the rate of the surface. That has not been the case thus far.

I think too much emphasis is placed on long term trends without considering what happens between the end points.

Mann was not vindicated by the NAS. They agreed with Wegman, but in politer words. It’s just RC and others who’ve tried to substitute the message that “bad math” plus a lack of comment about consequences of the bad math means vindication.

Errors in UAH have been worked on and corrected as they’ve come to light. A far cry from any of the other global metrics.

yonason (08:35:06) :So, as you have stated it, no it isn’t a fact, and won’t be until they find clear unequivocal and evidence
I don’t want to turn this into a discussion of Evolution, but your statement shows that you do not know about modern biology. That’s OK, of course, as there are lots of things not everybody knows about.

Of course there is. They were obviously fine in 2008 when they were coming up with negative anomalies but there is clearly a problem now.
Give it a rest with this nonsense. There is a significant El Nino taking place at the moment and temperatures in the atmosphere are responding to it – just as they responded to the La Nina in 2008.

I thought it was just the AGWers who rejected data they didn’t like.

Exactly what part of the world contributed to it? It wasn’t Europe, or North America or China, or Mexico, or Russia… So, where was it? I want to see a break down into smaller areas so it’s source can be found. If it isn’t all the extra cold areas, then there must be some spot, or spots, that is/are much hotter than usual.

Firstly, satellites are not measuring the surface. They are measuring temperatures in the troposphere. But, in answer to your question, the Pacific has been particularly warm- that’s more than 30% of the earth’s surface. The Middle East, North Africa, Mediterranean region and South America have also been warm. As have Greenland and parts of Canada.

Bob Carter does a pretty good job of falsifying the hysterical aspects, and seriously weakens the AGW hypothesis.
(that’s the first of 4, all of which are great)

And, once the hysteria is gone, it matters not if humans are affecting the climate in a small way, or not. PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO HOW HE DEFINES WHAT THE WARMERS MEAN BY AGW (now “climate change.”) Note that THAT is what needed to be falsified, and it has been.

I am skeptical of the “theory” of most warming occuring at the poles. I think this might be, possibly, because that is where the AGWers’ charts show most red. But, we also note that the fewer thermometers, the larger the red. “””

Well I believe if you think about some of the physical processes; you might become less skeptical of that “theory”.

First observation; there’s a lot of ice and snow and cold at the two ends of the earth; spoecially when you compare the ends with the tropical zone deserts. Ergo, it is reasonable to assume that it might be colder on average, at those polar ends, than in the tropics; because ice and snow don’t appreciate high temperatures.

Second observation. Conventional black body radiation theory (Planck’s Law) says that the rate of energy emission from a (black)body follows a fourth power of temperature law. Hence those colder polar zones are probably radiating energy much slower than is happening at the tropical zones.
So the poles are not capable of radiating at the same rate as the tropical zones. At the highest tropical desert areas where surface temperatures migh exceed +60 deg C (140 F), the radiant emittance can be more than ten times what it is at the coldest polar regions like Vostok Station in Antarctica.
Observation three. Because of this large temperature differential from the hottest places to the coldest places (as much as 150 deg c in the extreme); natural thermal processes of convection and conduction, both in the oceans and the atmopshere, will tend to transfer large quantities of heat energy from the tropics to the polar cold regions; which are incapable of disposing of this excess heat because of their low temperatures.

The natural consequence of this is that the lows tend to come up faster than the highs do, if there is a net increase in input energy (from whatever source).

So it is ok to be suspicious of the lack of adequate surface temperature sensing in the polar regions; but there is not much wrong with the idea that if things are generally warming, it is the coldest places that would show the biggest changes.

One additional physics factor. In the hottest desert surface temperatures of +60 deg order, the thermal radiation spectrum would tend to peak at about 8.7 microns wavelength; well at least BB radiation would. That is a long way from the 15 micron wavelength of the principal active CO2 absorption band; so CO2 GHG effects ar reduced over the hot tropical arid deserts.
But at the coldest spots like Vostok Station in the Antarctic highlands; temperatures can get down close to -90 deg C, and then the BB spectrum peak can be as long as about 16 microns; so it is virtually sitting right on the CO2 principal absorption band.

So CO2 GHG effect is a good bit more effective at blocking the outgoing LWIR in those colder regions, even though the amount of energy blocked is way lower than in the troipics.

So I don’t think that the faster warming polar regions hill is a good hill to die on. Pick some other place to make a stand.

One battle does not win a war.
Otherwise, all Yanks would all be speakin’ Rebeleze.

One satellite reading does not prove anything.
Otherwise, the AGW’ers would be spending our poor savings dry.

We are about ‘truth’ here, not a cause. If it can be proved that they’re right, they’re right. This isn’t a crusade against the heathens; though they do look rather strange when they start chanting and jumping up and down in a blizzard. I thought the idea was to get at the truth (whatever that may be).

If the sat’s broke, fix it.
If the sat ain’t broke, explain the reading.
How do the read outs (and altitude) factor into what is on the ground?
Don’t sit around cryin’ in your beer!
“Scientists don’t cry! Scientists DON’T Cry!”
(or was that baseball players?)

Namely that Dr Spencer’s 13 month running average, consists of the current month (as reported) plus the prior six, and the following six to give 13 numbers that are averaged.

BUT !!! if that is in fact true (probably is), the actual ELAPSED TIME from start to finish of the fulls et of data that is in that running average is ONLY 12 MONTHS AKA ONE FULL YEAR !!! Fancy that. What Dr Roy calls a 13 month running average, is actually the integral of only 12 months of elapsed time data.

Wow ! or as Archimedes shrieked in his birthday suit escapade; EUREKA !!!

Dr. Roy; if that is what you do; then all is forgiven; forget that I even mentioned it. Under that regimen, any systematic cyclic variation due to the fact that it takes the earth approximately 12 months to circumnavigate the sun, is completely integrated out; and by infewrence, the same is true of your 25 month smoothing too.

So all is now clear Roy; what a dummy I am not seeing that. I figured that you and Prof John Christy between you were smart enough to do it properly; so Green Flag, no fou,l so sail on; and as far as I am concerned you can go back to that two laps 25 month thing too; that never bothered me versus the 13.

[i]Observation three. Because of this large temperature differential from the hottest places to the coldest places (as much as 150 deg c in the extreme); natural thermal processes of convection and conduction, both in the oceans and the atmopshere, will tend to transfer large quantities of heat energy from the tropics to the polar cold regions; which are incapable of disposing of this excess heat because of their low temperatures.[/i]

Not sure what you’re getting at in suggesting that “cold regions are incapable of disposing of this excess heat because of their low temperatures”. Is there in fact ever any excess heat? Transfer between regions can only continue while one is colder than the other. If temperature equilibrium was ever reached then the heat transfer would stop. As to the amount of heat transfered, isn;t this a zero sum game? So what is your argument for the coldest places showing the biggest changes?

If I understood correctly, the result of phase 5 conversion is a temperature at desired altitude (500 mbar or 14000 ft?). Is part of this phase to also make a conversion of this temperature to surface temperatue?

If it is, does it rely on some constant between temperature and altitude, like how much temperature drops with altitude? Or some other equation?
If so, what will happen if a some kind of “Arctic oscillation” happens and cold air from polar areas flows down from the northern regions just above the surface and warm air from Pacific flows towards the polar region on top of this colder and heavier air?

For example if Coriolis effect pushes the warm air from Pacific towards the eastern Canadian shoreline and when it meets the shore and cold air mass near ground, would it possibly flow over the cold air and continue towards NE?

Then we could have an anomaly where temperature at 14000 ft (measured by satellite) could be a lot warmer than the actual surface temperature? Is this situation somehow compensated in the conversion algorithm?
This is the reason why I’m interested about comparing the surface and satellite temperatures in Northern Territories, like Yellowknife and other locations.

If we could get the “satellite temperature map” and it happened to show red in the areas where surface temperatures show less, then I’d like find aviation weather information of these locations to check what has been the wind speed and heading at 14000 ft.

Could similar event have contributed to El Nino 1998 spike in temperatures?

The belief that CO2 is a great absorber of heat is just nonsense. CO2 when compared to air is poor at absorbing heat and compared to water vapor is positively insignificant. This can be verified easily in any lab, at any time, anywhere on the planet. Any claims otherwise had better come with real, repeatable, testable results showing not on charts but visually the actual real ability of CO2 to be the great heat lover it is claimed to be.
With a specific heat capacity of CO2 less than nitrogen, oxygen and aluminum, CO2 would appear to transfer heat to space more efficiently than either nitrogen or oxygen. And CO2 like aluminum retains next to no heat at all. So good luck to all those subscribing to this heat monster myth.

The website Science of Doom should be renamed Pseudoscience of Doom. AGW science is nothing but a bunch of confused nonsense based heavily on abstracted physics, models and lots of math. The line by the author of the prologue to “CO2 An Insignificant Trace Gas?” sums the believers stance up quite well. In it the author says “For science, personal experience and imagination are not the deciding factors. They lead you astray”.Really, does not science start from the personal observation of someone. Is not a blackbody an abstraction of reality? I have heard people claim that a blackbody has somehow materialized to be easily studied by science. NO.
Does the earth have a homogenous albedo that can easily be quantified by an average.

For 79 billion dollars and counting one would think that experiments done in the atmosphere (besides radiosondes) would be proposed, engineered and executed. So where are they? Its all well and nice to have a satellite in orbit and some sensors on the ground but without more scientific exploration of the atmosphere itself our knowledge is incomplete. So can anybody point me in the direction of the latest results of experiments in the stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere or exosphere?

AGW is a fraud (a cunning and clever one though) and fiasco right from the get go.

SABER deals with measuring the atmosphere from the Thermosphere on up (that’s 85 km and up), while weather (and 99.99% of heat) takes place in the Troposphere (that’s up to 11-20 km) where 80% of the mass of the atmosphere resides, and a tiny bit in the Stratosphere (that’s up to 50 km), although the Stratosphere is so rarefied that it almost doesn’t count.

The point is that what SABER is measuring, re-radiation from the Thermosphere on up, is beyond negligible when it comes to affecting the temperature of the earth, and certainly can have very little effect on wind circulation patterns way down in the much denser Troposphere. The air in the Stratosphere, at 20 km up, is only 1/1000th as dense as the air at sea level… imagine how thin it is way up at 85 km!

You postulate that we are ignorant of what the warmers say, but we are not. You then posit laziness as an explanation for that non-existent ignorance. Like all warmers, your theory and it’s basic assumptions are fantasies

I repeat, we know what they say, and why it is wrong. See the video I reference in my yonason (10:41:42) : , above, to see for yourself, …that is, unless you’re too lazy?

No, I don’t want to go too off road on this either, but if at some time you can supply some good references that you think address/refute what I said, by all means let me know what they are. I would be happy (and quite surprised) to see them.

All the moaning about whether the satellites are working properly or whatever,and even to state that January was unusually warm must be wrong because of widespread cold weather,is funny because it actually AGAIN does not support the AGW hypothesis at all!

I am a long running climate skeptic who has never accepted the AGW hypothesis and with events of the last decade climatically as indicative that the hypothesis is flat worthless.

I personally expected that it was going to get very warm because of the El-Nino being around a few months that was finally going to show up in the temperature data.It seems that some of you forget that most of the warming occurred in the ocean,a 70% area of surface coverage.

The snow and cold occurred on the CONTINENTS,thus it seems impossible for a very warm January overall to show up on Satellite data,but it is possible since the sheer size of the ocean surface area swamps the continents surface area.

I for one see this as a bump in the road and see an over all cooling in the years ahead,since we have several factors that are promoting it.

No. You say it must be the oceans, since it probably wasn’t the land. Well, like I said above, show me where exactly the alleged warming is coming from, and support the result with another method, and I might reconsider, but failing that, the result is so beyond what is expected, that it must automatically become suspect.

Smokey, you can declare everything I said as wrong but that doesn’t magically make it so. Can you actually refute the points I made?

The link between Carbion Dioxide and global temperatures is incontrovertible. It is not the ONLY driver of climate but it is a very significant one. Do you have another explanation for the observed warming? Have any of the other drivers of Earth’s climate been anomalous over the past 50 years?

To those who still believe carbondioxide is cause for global warming:
Note that the carbondioxide content went up by 0.01% from 0.03% (=280 ppm) to 0.04% (380 ppm) during the last 50 years, i.e from 1960 to 2010.
I have spent about 3 or 4 months now in the evenings as my hobby investigating the science behind the CO2 thing and I came to the conclusion that no one has ever done any proper investigations. Really, nobody convinced me from any type of research that CO2 is the cause of global warming. You see, if carbon dioxide traps infra red radiation from earth (keeping us warm) then it must follow that carbon dioxide also shields us from the sun (similar to ozone blocking UV and water vapor blocking IR). So the question I asked everyone and everywhere is: what is the net effect, especially at the relevant levels of carbon dioxide of 0.02% – 0.05%? (200-500 ppm). I found no clear answers to this simple question. The tests done on CO2 are on 100% and are then extrapolated to much smaller concentrations. That is not the right kind of science. It also seems that no one has realized that CO2 also causes cooling. In fact, together with an increase in water vapor (shallow water-dams for human consumption and irrigation) and an increase noted in ozone, carbon dioxide helps to increase earth’s albedo. (=earthshine). They actually use this UV absorption of CO2 to test whether there is CO2 on other planets.

Let us do a few simple scientific thought experiments. I think even non scientists can understand my thinking.
Experiment 1.
We have a glass vessel, about 10000 liters, flushed and filled with 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen, representing the earth and its atmosphere at the beginning. We have a probe on the side, in the middle, connected to a thermocouple and a temperature recorder. We have a large heating element right in the middle of the vessel. The vessel is closed from the outside. The outside temperature and humidity is kept constant, at all times. A measured amount of energy is released into the vessel. The resulting increase of the temperature in the vessel is recorded until it falls back to the base line. The area below the curve is measured. The measurements are repeated until a constant result can be reported. (A). We now double the amount of energy released into the vessel, this increase representing the doubling of energy released by human activity on earth from 3.5 billion people in 1960 to 7 billion people in 2009. The area below the curve is measured. The measurements are repeated until a constant result can be reported. (B)
In the case of this first experiment, the result is predictable i.e. if you double the amount of energy released in a vessel you should find close to a doubling of the area under your graph.
Experiment 2
Experiment 2 is exactly the same as experiment 1, but now the vessel is filled with 80/20 N2/O2 + 350 ppm CO2. The results are C en D. What would be interesting for us to know is the difference between A and C and between B and D – in other words: if we release similar amounts of energy into the vessel, what effects, if any, does the 350 ppm’s of carbon dioxide have on temperature retention inside the vessel?
Admittedly, I don’t have the equipment to do these simple tests, but the results are predictable.
The 350 ppm CO2 added are far too small to have any effect on heat retention in this experiment. In other words: there is no measurable difference between A and C and between B and D. The concentration of CO2 is too low.
So now, from these simple thought experiments I have made the following conclusions:

a) the 100 odd ppms of CO2 added to the atmosphere since 1960 have had no measurable influence on heat retention (in this experiment)
b) if we add another 100 ppm’s (on top of the 350) it will also not have any effect at all on same measurements , i.e. still no measurable heat retention in this experiment.
c) if anything, assuming the atmosphere is indeed a greenhouse as claimed, (meaning my idea of representing the earth as a glass vessel is reasonable), the result from my experiment no.1 must mean that global warming is caused by humans releasing energy in the atmosphere. This would seem to indicate to me that AHF is much bigger than presently being thought possible… That also means: only that energy that we steal from nature is green (solar, wind, gravity, tidal etc.). Nuclear is not green, H2/O2 combustion (rocket fuel) is not green, fossil fuel is not green. It seems to me that CO2 is just made a major culprit because it suits certain interest groups. “What else can it be?” let us have planet, add some CO2, see if the temperature goes up, it did, so that must be it.
Unfortunately, I think some decent testing would reveal that the CO2 is not to blame, at least not at current concentrations. What I found is: they used experiments with 100% CO2 and then extrapolated the results to smaller concentrations. You cannot do that. Any good scientist knows that properties of a solution or mixture may change with varying concentrations. You always have to do your measurements at relevant concentrations, i.e. 0.02 – 0.05% (200-500 ppm) CO2

Anyways, to finish my story: I have now come to a point where I doubt that global warming is at all possible…. Namely, common sense tells me that as the sun heats the water of the oceans and the temperatures rise, there must be a point where some sort of a mechanism switches the water-cooling system of earth on, if it gets too hot. Don’t forget that earth is 70% water! Follow my thinking on these easy steps:

1) the higher the temp. of the oceans, the more water vapor rises to the atmosphere,

2) the more water vapor rises from the oceans, the more difference in air pressure, the more wind starts blowing
3) the more wind & warmth, the more evaporation of water (evaporation increasing by many times due to the wind factor),
4) the more evaporation of water the more humidity in the air (atmosphere)
5) the higher the humidity in the air the more clouds can be formed
6) Svensmark’s theory: the more galactic cosmic rays (GCR), the more clouds are formed (if the humidity is available)
7) the more clouds appear, the more rain and snow and cooler weather,

8) the more clouds and overcast conditions, the more radiation from the sun is deflected from the earth,
9) The more radiation is deflected from earth, the cooler it gets.
10) This cooling puts a brake on the amount water vapor being produced. So now it is back to 1) and wait for heat to start same cycle again…

Now when I first considered this, I stood in amazement again. I remember thinking of the words in Isaiah 40:12-26.

I have been in many factories that have big (water) cooling plants, but I realised that earth itsself is a water cooling plant on a scale that you just cannot imagine. I also thought that my idea of seeing earth as a giant (water) cooling plant with a built-in thermostat must be pretty original….

But it was only soon after that I stumbled on a paper from someone who had already been there, done that …. well, God bless him for that!

i.e. if you want to prove something, you always do need at least two witnesses!

“To those who still believe carbondioxide is cause for global warming:
Note that the carbondioxide content went up by 0.01% from 0.03% (=280 ppm) to 0.04% (380 ppm) during the last 50 years, i.e from 1960 to 2010.”

It strikes me as a little disingenuous to claim Co2 has only increased by 0.01%, especially when it is not put into the proper context, which you did not do in your last post. Levels of Co2 went up by about 40% (280ppm-380ppm) which increased it’s total level in the atmosphere from 0.0% to just under 0.04% it did not go up BY only 0.01%, If we want to get specific, 0.028% (or 280ppm) times 140% is 0.0392% (or 392ppm, a level we are 4ppm below currently), an increase of 40%.

“You see, if carbon dioxide traps infra red radiation from earth (keeping us warm) then it must follow that carbon dioxide also shields us from the sun (similar to ozone blocking UV and water vapor blocking IR)”

It must do nothing of the sort, and it doesn’t do anything of the sort. Carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, etc, all allow most of the sun’s radiation to pass through them because it is short wave radiation. After it has heated up the Earth it is re emitted as long wave radiation, which does not pass through carbon dioxide as easily, it as absorbed and causes warming in the earth’s atmosphere. It is completely different to ozone, simply because one reflects the Sun’s harmful UV rays does not mean the other has to also reflect mostly everything from the sun, and to suggest that it does is a failure of logic.

Basically Henry, your major point of dissent here is that Carbon Dioxide is not as potent a greenhouse gas as is claimed(or one at all). If it is not then it can’t be the cause of the observed warming. If it IS as potent as claimed then there really is no other explanation for the anomalous warming (at this time), the warming has occurred almost exactly as one would predict when theorizing about the effects of increased Co2 in the atmosphere. It depends whether or not you accept the scientific research on carbon dioxide, reaching back as far as the early nineteenth century when it’s properties as a greenhouse gas where clearly established.

But let’s operate on the assumption that Co2 isn’t a greenhouse gas. What is your explanation for the anomalous warming? I predict you will either say “It’s natural” or “we don’t yet know”, but those aren’t explanations at all.

“Anyways, to finish my story: I have now come to a point where I doubt that global warming is at all possible”

Well we can stop right there because we know it happens. First of all not only does it occur naturally free of human interference, no skeptic contests that, but it is happening NOW because we have recorded anomalous warming with thermometers. You doubt that global warming is possible even though it is happening before your very eyes, most skeptics don’t even doubt that temperatures have risen, they merely doubt the causes, but you claim it is not even possible!. It’s like claiming it is impossible that the temperature will exceed 30c degrees today when the temperature is already at 40c degrees.

The belief that CO2 is a great absorber of heat is just nonsense. CO2 when compared to air is poor at absorbing heat and compared to water vapor is positively insignificant. This can be verified easily in any lab, at any time, anywhere on the planet. Any claims otherwise had better come with real, repeatable, testable results showing not on charts but visually the actual real ability of CO2 to be the great heat lover it is claimed to be.
With a specific heat capacity of CO2 less than nitrogen, oxygen and aluminum, CO2 would appear to transfer heat to space more efficiently than either nitrogen or oxygen. And CO2 like aluminum retains next to no heat at all. So good luck to all those subscribing to this heat monster myth. “””

Well Brian, perhaps first we should deal with some terminology; starting with that word “heat”.

I was not the first to make the observation or declaration that “heat” is NOT a noun. (it’s a verb).

“Heating” is a process of raising the average kinetic energy of actual molecules of material; any material. But “Heat” has also come to be colloqially equated with that molecular kinetic energy itself rather than the process. In any case, the word heat has NO physical significance of any kind, in the absence of actual material i.e. molecules of something. It is not something that can propagate in the absence of molecules or atoms.

So questions of exactly where “heat” (in that kinetic energy sense) resides in the atmosphere, certainly involve matters like the “specific heat” of the various component gases of the atmosphere; including CO2.

But what CO2, and other GHGs such as H2O and methane CH4 can and do do in the atmosphere, is selectively intercept and absorb ENERGY in the form of Electromagnetic Radiation; treated either as a Photon stream or a wave as you prefer.

And CO2 most certainly does intercept photons, in a number of prominent wavelength bands, the most important of which covers approximately the wavelength range from 13.5 to about 16.5 microns in the Long Wave Infra Red region. This happens to be a significant part of the total thermal radiation (EM LWIR) emitted by the earth’s surface (land and sea) as well as from the warm atmosphere itself.

And it can be clearly demonstrated in the laboratory that this process is quite effective and raises the kinetic energy of the CO2 molecule. In resulting collisions with other molecules of the atmosphere, this captured energy generally gets transferred to the ordinary atmospheric gases of N2, O2, and Ar; which thereby raises the atmospheric temperature.

There is not much future in denying that this process occurs.

As to the consequence for the total energy balance of the planet; that it a much more complicated issue, but to deny that CO2 “heats” the atmosphere as do other green house molecules, is not a fruitful pursuit.

As to what total effect that has, and how the exact amount of CO2 comes into play are other issues.
Water H2O differs from all other GHGs, in that it alone exists in the atmosphere in all three phases, vapor, liquid, and solid, and in the latter two phases, H2O forms clouds which result in negative feedback cooling, to counter the positive feedback heating that H2O vapor performs.

It is that cloud feedback override, that can negate the atmospheric warming due to CO2.; but it does not stop the CO2 from blocking some outgoing LWIR energy; which is perfectly capable of propagating in the complete absence of any materials; unlike “heat”.

Missingo, it seems you have decided before you have done the relevant testing?
Fact is: The human population has doubled in the past 50 years. If you put the kettle on, the water in the kettle gets warmer. As proven from the results of my experiment: The problem could simply be the amount of heat that we produce to fly, to drive, to cook, to cool, or to stay warm or cold. Simple arithmetic. I can see a rise of 2.5 degrees in temp. when I drive at night from the country into the city.
Missingo, do you not believe the outcome of that experiment?
But I want to make it clear again: how do we know for sure that earth has warmed
compared to say, the past 100 years? Or even when you compare 1930 with 2010?What equipment was used in those days? What we are measuring now is in 0.1 of degrees C. Did they have that kind of an accuracy 80 or 100 years ago?

I think the thermostat hyposthesis is the one for me, because it means that the climate is always more or less in equilibrium. If it gets too warm, it will get cooler and if it gets too cool it will get warmer again. That’s life. Live with it.

[i]Observation three. Because of this large temperature differential from the hottest places to the coldest places (as much as 150 deg c in the extreme); natural thermal processes of convection and conduction, both in the oceans and the atmopshere, will tend to transfer large quantities of heat energy from the tropics to the polar cold regions; which are incapable of disposing of this excess heat because of their low temperatures.[/i]

Not sure what you’re getting at in suggesting that “cold regions are incapable of disposing of this excess heat because of their low temperatures”. Is there in fact ever any excess heat? Transfer between regions can only continue while one is colder than the other. If temperature equilibrium was ever reached then the heat transfer would stop. As to the amount of heat transfered, isn;t this a zero sum game? So what is your argument for the coldest places showing the biggest changes? “””

I thought I had already explained that in considerable detail.

The coldest points on earth’s surface in the Antarctic Highlands near Vostok Station, in the middle of winter midnight reach as low as (unofficially) -90 C, -130 F or 183 Kelvins. The absolute maximum possible radiation emittance from such a surface (black body) is given by the Stefan-Boltzmann law W = 5.6697 x 10^-8 x T^4 Watts per square metre; which is 63.6 Watt’s per square metre. No surface at 183 K can exceed that rate of radiation.

The hottest dry desert surfaces in the North African and middle east deserts can be in excess of +60 deg C, 140 For 333 Kelvins, so the maximum rate of emission there can be no higher than:-
5.6697 x 10^-8 x 333^4 or 697.2 Watts per metre squared. That’s a factor of 10.96 times the rate near Vostok at its coldest.
For the supposed mean global surface temperature of about +15 deg C or 59 F; 288 Kelvins, the maximum emittance is 5.6697 x 10^-8 x 288^4 which is 390 Watts per square metre, the number given in Trenberth’s official NOAA energy budget chart.

Because of this 4th power law, it takes a lot more energy to raise the temperature of the hottest tropical deserts by one deg C than it does to raise the temperature of Vostok station by one deg C. In fact i just showed you that it would take about 11 times as much.

Consequently if the total energy input to the earth increases, the temperature rise in the hottest regions is only a fraction of the temperature increases in the coldest regions.

You are forgetting
1) we are talking about an increase of 0.01% compared to water vapor avg 1% in air
2) water vapor is a much stronger greenhouse gas. How much is that increasing because of human activities (shallow waters, dams, etc.)?
3) CO2 also absorps in the UV, visible and near IR, meaning it also reflects sunlight like ozone and water vapor does. So what is the net effect?

No. You say it must be the oceans, since it probably wasn’t the land. Well, like I said above, show me where exactly the alleged warming is coming from, and support the result with another method, and I might reconsider, but failing that, the result is so beyond what is expected, that it must automatically become suspect.

If it turns out that’s true, fine. But don’t expect me to buy it when so many other, and more direct, indications say, “NO!” without further, and a lot more, details.”

Sigh,

I am commenting on the CURRENT warming phase,and noting that most of it is over the ocean areas of the world,which is 70% of the surface.Yet we read and talk about large scale snow and cold in the Northern Hemisphere,as if it means the world is cooling down.It is not because of several different satellite data,showing why it is a very warm January.

Most of the reason for such a warm January occurred over the ocean waters.

I never claimed that the oceans are in a long term warming trend at all,please disabuse that thought.

I know about the ARGOS project and even have a link to that website,at my climate skeptic forum.I agree that there is a small cooling trend in the ocean since at least 2003.

I do not accept the AGW hypothesis,but do accept the fact that since 1979,there has been small warming trend,but a cooling one since 2001.

This El_nino will fade away and a few months after that,the main warm pool of air will also fade away as it gets absorbed in weather systems.

The satellite data is superior to ground based data,because it measures by far a much larger area.Ground based measurements are very narrow and usually within 30 feet of the surface and lower.

In my view most climate researchers are looking in the wrong place,to find out why there is a “recovery” trend ongoing from the LIA climatic epoch.

Thus the reason why I have suggested not to blast a single month data,simply because it was very warm.

Actually, he disavowed the credit a few months ago, stating that although their middle initials are identical, the actual middle names are not.

Missingno (13:12:21) :

The link between Carbion Dioxide and global temperatures is incontrovertible. It is not the ONLY driver of climate but it is a very significant one. Do you have another explanation for the observed warming?

“Yes, I agree that what you say is probably true. But why not state where the heat is coming from and confirm your (and my) analysis? Leaving the statement the way it stands opens the door to the propagandist.

Mike Ramsey”

I did state that most of it was coming from the oceans,the part that is NOT getting all that snow and cold,that we read and hear so much about.

Hmmmm. Interesting. The reality is that no scientist of Nobel calibre would be seen dead within several miles of this blog. The fact that you assert that the George Smith who posts here (at some rambling and incoherent length) is the same guy who was awarded the Nobel for his work on CCDs suggests a hitherto unsuspected level of delusion, and further, since Mr Smith has denied it several times over implies that you don’t actually bother to read the comments on your own blog …

George, knowing now who you are, as a non-scientist I will definitely tread extremely carefully in my quest for better understanding.

There was nothing hard about the above post which explained clearly why due to differences in radiation emission it takes 11 times as much input energy to raise the hottest tropical deserts by one deg C than it takes to raise the Vostok station by one deg C.

The problem I have is with the statement in your previous post (10:54:33) that “the polar cold regions … are incapable of disposing of this excess heat because of their low temperatures”.

Should I be thinking along the lines that the polar cold regions accept all the heat emitted from the hottest tropical deserts (“excess heat”) and other sources and retain most of it because of their low radiation emissions (“low temperatures”).

The question I would now ask is “What measuring work has been done in the cold polar regions to prove that energy inputs exceed radiation emissions?.

“But I want to make it clear again: how do we know for sure that earth has warmed
compared to say, the past 100 years? Or even when you compare 1930 with 2010?What equipment was used in those days? What we are measuring now is in 0.1 of degrees C. Did they have that kind of an accuracy 80 or 100 years ago?”

Because we have thermometer readings going back over 150 years indicating that it is warming. The equipment being used to measure temperatures 150 years ago was sufficiently accurate. But don’t take my word for it, do some research, instead of just jumping to the baseless conclusion that “the readings must have been wrong”.

“The problem could simply be the amount of heat that we produce to fly, to drive, to cook, to cool, or to stay warm or cold. Simple arithmetic. I can see a rise of 2.5 degrees in temp. when I drive at night from the country into the city.
Missingo, do you not believe the outcome of that experiment?”

You are arguing for the urban heat island effect, which has been proven to have negligible effects on thermometer readings, but don’t take my word for it, look it up.

Roger Knights

“The earth hasn’t been in a warming trend since 1959. It was flat-to-cooling from 1942 until about 1978.”

What on earth do you call this then?

If that isn’t a warming trend I don’t know what is.

It is unfathomable that anybody can contest that the Earth HAS been warming, skeptics can question the causes of that warming, no worries, but denying that temperatures have actually increased? That really is nothing but low rent denial.

“CO2 also absorps in the UV, visible and near IR, meaning it also reflects sunlight like ozone and water vapor does. So what is the net effect?”

Again, Co2 does nothing of the sort, it allows all UV wavelengths to pass through it when entering the Earth and does not reflect sunlight, but absorbs it as it bounces back into the atmosphere as long wave radiation.

Roger Knights: “The earth hasn’t been in a warming trend since 1959. It was flat-to-cooling from 1942 until about 1978.”

What on earth do you call this then?

A flat-to-cooling trend from 1942 until about 1978. The level in 1959 was well below that peak in 1942. That’s why there was such a furor about the threat of global cooling in the 1970s. It wasn’t until 1980 or so that what looked at the time like a mere slight “correction” (as they say on Wall Street) in the downtrend turned out to be the start of an uptrend.

If that isn’t a warming trend I don’t know what is.

Not from 1942 to 1978. 1978 was lower than 1942. Only by 1980 was the 1942 peak exceeded. So it’s fair to call the period from 1942 to 1978 flat to declining, although 1978 was slightly warmer than 1959.

OTOH, since 1959 was the low point after the decline from 1942, you could say that temperatures have been in an uptrend since 1959. But that would be wrong, :-) because there was no significant turnaround in the sideways drift until 1978. I had the impression that most warmist scientists agree with the interpretation I’ve just given. Let me know if I’m wrong.

It is unfathomable that anybody can contest that the Earth HAS been warming, …

Strawman.

… skeptics can question the causes of that warming, no worries, but denying that temperatures have actually increased? That really is nothing but low rent denial.

I personally seem to be in a minority here (among those who post, who may not be representative) in that I think that, despite problems with the instrumental records (which ought of course to be fixed, and whose sloppiness or worse lowers the credibility of those who have curated them), the end-result will be only a minor adjustment. The satellite record and various natural proxies indicate that global warming is occurring.

I attribute the warming to a rebound from the LIA (i.e., to chaotic system vainly seeking an ever-shifting point of equilibrium) supplemented in recent decades by warm phases of the PDO, etc. Prof. Akasofu has a highly illustrated and educational 50-page PDF on this: http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/little_ice_age.php

Missingo, study the relevant solar radiation spectra – note the difference between what is read on top of the atmosphere and what is measured below at sea level – even on a sunny day….. The difference is mostly caused by: oxygen/ozone, water vapor and yes, believe it or not: carbon dioxide! As I said before: they even use the absorption of carbon dioxide in the UV part to see if there is carbon dioxide on other planets. Did you have a good look at the spectra of CO2 and that of the sun?
So carbon dioxide blocks some radiation from the sun. If I stand in the sun here in Africa and I feel the sun on my skin it becomes warm but if the humidity goes up in the day then I can feel that that same radiation becomes less warm. Why? The water vapor blocks the hot IR. CO2 does the same thing, to a lesser degree at various wave lengths.. That is why I asked: what is the net result? How do you know what the net result is unless someone has done some decent testing on this? You have not commented on this and the results of my testing. Read all of my entries on this post carefully and you will get the picture, I am sure.

Roger knights, I misread your post, “there has not been a warming trend since 1950” incorrectly, I assume you meant the Earth had not warmed at all, that there had been no warming trend since then. Yes, average temperatures where flat from around 42-78, and then shot up into a sharp warming trend. You’re right about the straw man, it is unfathomable “to me” I should have said.

But you at least accept the obvious, that temperatures have been increasing. I don’t like to use the D word if I can help it, but the only true denialism surrounding this whole issue is coming from those who can stare 150 years of recorded temperatures (not to mention proxies) in the face and deduce that the Earth has been cooling/not warming.

Henry Pool, I’ll admit I don’t know the intricacies of Co2, but I’m pretty sure decent testing has been done on those things, I’ll leave the digging on that to you. If you are challenging the very assumption that Co2 is a greenhouse gas then I don’t think I can debate you further, because I am operating on the premise that Co2 IS a greenhouse gas, based on 150 years of research about it, whereas you are operating on the assumption that it is not, I suppose we have to agree to disagree.

But nevertheless you can’t explain away recorded temperatures by drawing a conclusion, based on nothing, that the readings must be false simply because it would fit better into your own explanation if they where. You are going to have to reconcile your position of Co2 not being a greenhouse gas (or not being potent enough) with recorded anomalous warming. If it is not Co2 it is something else, because the Earth IS warming, and something is causing it, it is not just happening spontaneously.

yonason (12:19:45) :if at some time you can supply some good references that you think address/refute what I said, by all means let me know what they are. I would be happy (and quite surprised) to see them.
There are so many that the mind boggles, but two good ones are two books by Richard Dawkins:
“The greatest show on earth” ISBN 978-1-4165-9478-9 and
“Climbing mount improbable” ISBN 0-393-03930-7
There contain more references than you would care to examine.
But it is not enough to ‘see them’, you must actually open them and read them.

Missingo, you have not answered me on the results of my experiments 1+2? Anyone can see what the argument is about: the 100 ppm CO2 (0.01%) added since 1960 changes nothing on heat retention in my experiments. The amount is too small. Now if you were to introduce 1 or 2% water vapor in those experiments, you probably would see some heat retention taking place but it would still be small compared to doubling of energy release due to the doubling of the population over the past 50 years.
If I had found results from proper research showing me what the net result is, I would have been happy. But it does not exist. It seems everybody thought that somebody would do and in the end nobody did it. If I look carefully at the spectra I would say it is close to 50/50 i.e. it cools as much (by reflecting radiation from the sun) as it causes warming in the 14-15 um range by trapping radiation from earth … Even if the balance is more toward GHG: remember we only talk about 0.01% compared to 1960 and it is a much weaker greenhouse gas then water vapor.
Whatever is causing global warming (if it still happens) Co2 is not causing it.
Why does nobody talk about reducing water vapor to combat global warming? Because it is silly. Where there is no water vapor in the air, everything turned into a desert.
Same argument applies to CO2. In fact, more CO2 would be benficial as is promotes crop growth and forest growth. In fact, everything you eat today depends on CO2.

Henry @ Missingo
Assuming global warming is still happening.
I would still believe in the thermostat hypothesis.
Go back to my step 6.
there are variations. Even the ancients knew about the 11 or 12 year suncycles.
The only variation that can cause global warming or cooling is in the amount of clouds formed. The Svensmark theory holds that galactic cosmic rays (GCR) initiate cloud formation. I have not seen this, but apparently this has been proven in laboratory conditions. So the only real variability in global temperature could be caused by the amount of GCR reaching earth. In turn, this depends on the activity of the sun, i.e. the extent of the solar magnetic field exerted by the sun on the planetary system. Apparently we are now coming out of a period where this field was bigger and more GCR was bent away from earth (this is then what I would say really caused “global warming”, mostly).
Apparently now the solar geomagnetic field is at an all time low.
Look here:

Note that in the first graph, if you look at the smoothed monthly values, there was a tipping point in 2003 (light blue line). I cannot ignore the significance of this. I noted tipping points elsewhere round about that same time. From 2003 the solar magnetic field has been going down. To me it seems for sure that we are now heading for a period of more cloudiness and hence a period of global cooling. If you look at the 3rd graph, it is likely that there wil be no sun spots visible by 2015. This is confirmed by the paper on global cooling by Easterbrook:

In the 2nd graph of his presentation, Easterbrook projects global cooling into the future. These are the three lines that follow from the last warm period. If the cooling follows the top line we don’t have much to worry about and the weather will be similar to what we had in the previous (warm) period. However, indications are already that we have started following the trend of the 2nd line, i.e. cooling based on the 1880-1915 cooling. In that case it will be the coldest from 2015 to 2020 and the climate will be comparable to what it was in the fifties and sixties. I survived that time, so I guess we all will be fine, if this is the right trendline.
Note that with the third line, the projection stops somewhere after 2020. So if things go that way, we don’t know where it will end. Unfortunately, earth does not have a heater with a thermostat that switches on if it gets too cold. Too much ice and snow causes more sunlight to be reflected from earth. Hence, the trap is set. This is known as the ice age trap. This is why the natural state of earth is that of being covered with snow and ice.
As shown previously inhttps://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data ice ages have a better claim on being the natural state of earth’s climate than interglacials. According to the records, we are in fact pretty lucky to be here in this rare, warmer period. The broader lesson is: Climate does not stand still. And global cooling could be on its way.
Unfortunately, I am afraid that this is not a hoax (like the carbon dioxide scam – and the carbon footprint nonsense)

However, man is resourceful and may find ways around the problem if we do start falling into a little ice age again. As long as we are not ignorant and listen to the so-called climate scientists who really have other agenda’s. A green agenda is still useless if it has the wrong items on the agenda… Obviously: As Easterbrook notes, global cooling is much more disastrous for humans than global warming.

This means that air has been cooling by conduction and convection with the ice from a high in the beginning of the year to a low at the end of January.
How can this happen ? December, when it started rising, it was a 240K and turned in a few days +10K. No sun. The only way is large masses of air by convection coming to the pole sending back all that cold air that froze the northern land masses. The ice keeps radiating at its basic black body which should be at least the minimum values seen, and the bulk air will radiate with its peculiar gray body constant until it comes into thermal equilibrium with the ice surface. Since the mass of air(energy content) in the atmosphere is so much less than the mass of ice, ice will prevail, until a new input air mass from hotter regions.

I think that the anomalies have really a very distorted connection with the energies involved and are misleading , and that is why we get the dissonance between perception and anomaly data. To take this 10 degree anomaly, that is actually air froth, and average it with the 2 degree anomaly in France, for example, where the ground has really frozen by the snow and ice precipitation seems adding apples and oranges.

You postulate that we are ignorant of what the warmers say, but we are not.

Thank you for the Bob Carter video, wherein he uses a three-year and a nine-year period to tell us what is happening climatically.

The first section of the video, Carter puts a dictionary definition of the word ‘science’. Beneath are 2 entries, numbered 1 and…. 4. They both describe empirical science only, the science of ‘fact’. Apparently Carter believes science theories are not science, deduction has no part in science, nor correlation or any of the multitude of mathematical and theoretical tools that have been employed to make planes fly safely, cars drive smoother and computers talk to each other over long distances. I wonder what the definitions were for entries 2 and 3.

Carter does not, however, project a definition of ‘climate’ onto the screen. Which is a strange omission considering the topic. And it typifies the point I made in my post above. Cheers. He broaches the topic once, after pointing to the 3 and 9 year trend. He says, “you can argue over what is a climatically signficant period…”

And that’s it.

So, for him, it is ‘disinterest’ regarding the definition of climate. Were he to project it onto the screen during his oratory, it would rather undermine his argument.

And ‘disinterest’ followed my post. No one here spends a moment’s thought defining, discussing or ‘arguing about’ what a climatically significant period is, because an honest appraisal would render thousands of posts here moot.

For you, though, yonason, who troubled to take up the subject, your reply was a consequence of cognitive dissonance. Carter has nothing of value to say about the definition of climate. Thinking you were rebutting the point, you actually demonstrated it.

And so it will go on. This post may provoke more off-the-point remarks (“Hey, how about this blog page on climategate!”), but it is a wondrous black hole on this and other skeptical sites – that there is so much talk on climate trends and statistics, and none at all on what a statistically significant climate trend actually is.

If you don’t understand the terms you are using, there can be no value in what you are saying.

Here are statistical tests for (1) a reasonable, and (2), an absolute minimum climatically significant period.

I would like, for once, to see anyone skeptical of AGW make a substantive, mathematical rebuttal of these analyses. And having done so, present a well-reasoned argument, complete with maths, as to why one month, one year, or even 10-year temperature variations are statistically significant regarding climate.

I was very surprised to see Bob Carter’s graph in the video showing “no trend” for the satellite record up to January 2008. Running a trend analysis for the same period using the UAH data, as he did, I get a positive trend of 0.13C/decade, not far off the HadCRUT record for the same period.

You can check yourself – the data link is at the bottom of the top post of this thread.

I wouldn’t set much store in Bob Carter’s presentations. Fair showmanship, lousy science, under any definition.

I find it humorous that missingno would actual say that there is little else to raise the temperature than CO2. What cave must he live in?

Let’s see. There’s ocean oscillations like ENSO and PDO; Changes in the Sun’s irradiance (small but nonetheless real); GCRs; ozone depletion that a Canadian researcher matched up perfectly to the late 20th century warming; long term ocean currents; Volcanism (geothermal); Lunar modulation of tidal forces; magnetism changes; soot and other black carbon emissions, etc. Yes, I could go on but hopefully you get the point. Not to mention the impacts of things we haven’t even discovered yet.

With growing disinterest i see you are completely omitting an explanation for the “A” in AGW.

Dirk, as I said:

This post may provoke more off-the-point remarks (“Hey, how about this blog page on climategate!”), but it is a wondrous black hole on this and other skeptical sites – that there is so much talk on climate trends and statistics, and none at all on what a statistically significant climate trend actually is.

Thank you for demonstrating my speculation on digression, and reinforcing my point on avoidance.

Seeing as a vast number of articles and comments at this site are premised on the assumption that short-term trends (< 14 years) are climatically significant, a post reinforcing this assumption is long overdue.

The HUGE jump in temperature in January 2010 is strange, since it seems it is the BIGGEST such jump recorded, I say that by looking at the data, I am no expert at all. But the jump in sea surface temp is minuscule for January 2010. Maybe this is an error? Can alarmist NASA manipulate these temperatures since, as far as I know, both sea surface and tropospheric temperature come from the same NASA Satellite?

“For you, though, yonason, who troubled to take up the subject, your reply was a consequence of cognitive dissonance.”

That is simply psychological projection. It is Mr barry who suffers from cognitive dissonance. He attempts to put the onus on scientific skeptics, rather than where it properly belongs.

For the umpteenth time: skeptics have nothing to prove. The burden is entirely on the promoters of the AGW hypothesis to show that it explains reality better than the long accepted theory of natural climate variability. They have failed.

The failure of the AGW hypothesis is due to its proponents’ pointing to AGW studies and computer models as “evidence.” But neither are empirical [real world], verifiable evidence.

The AGW studies are, by and large, opinions. But no AGW paper has been able to provide empirical evidence showing that a quantified rise in CO2 results in a specific rise in the global temperature.

Climate peer review is hopelessly corrupted, as the Climategate emails show. Pro-AGW papers are promptly published, while papers skeptical of AGW are either interminably delayed, or more often, are summarily rejected.

A recent example of practically instant publication is the Menneke et al. paper which attempts to downplay the UHI effect. That paper was particularly sloppy, but it was routinely hand-waved through the climate peer review process by a friendly referee and published with alacrity.

The other so-called “evidence” of AGW is GCMs [computer climate models]. But GCMs are not evidence. They are simply tools — and not very accurate tools. Not one of the ≈ two dozen GCMs predicted the flat to cooling temperatures since 2002.

GCMs are programmed with a specific conclusion in mind. It may be deliberate, or it may be an unconscious decision due to the rewards of showing temperatures rising as a result of rising CO2. But the models project the same general outcomes in lock-step. That is due to programming bias, whether conscious or not.

It may be that there is some minor anthropogenic influence on global temperatures. But the AGW hypothesis fails, because the scientific method is not followed.

AGW believers attempt to re-frame the debate by demanding that skeptics must prove that AGW does not exist. In other words, skeptics are expected to prove a negative.

The motive for that duplicity is clear: if AGW proponents followed the scientific method, they know that their alarming climate catastrophe scenarios would be falsified. But with many $billions at stake, they are willing to defenestrate the scientific method in favor of scientifically invalid AGW propaganda.

Henry Pool (23:52:37) :
Missingo, you have not answered me on the results of my experiments 1+2? Anyone can see what the argument is about: the 100 ppm CO2 (0.01%) added since 1960 changes nothing on heat retention in my experiments. The amount is too small. Now if you were to introduce 1 or 2% water vapor in those experiments, you probably would see some heat retention taking place but it would still be small compared to doubling of energy release due to the doubling of the population over the past 50 years.

Your ‘experiments’ are meaningless in the context of the earth, to make it realistic suspend your gas filled chamber in a vacuum chamber with its walls at ~3K and heat it from outside with a lamp at a brightness temperature of ~5000K (no internal heater). That won’t deal with the variation of atmospheric pressure with altitude but it’s closer to reality.

“there is so much talk on climate trends and statistics, and none at all on what a statistically significant climate period actually is.”

Have a look at this series of enlarging scales of the temperature history of the planet and tell me what a statistically significant climate period is.

My definition would be: it depends on what you are studying. Climate is average weather, how big the averaging interval is depends on what one is studying. If it is the emergence of homo sapiens, it is different ( look at the holocene optimum).
If it is whether anthropogenic excess CO2 is affecting average temperatures, it is different. In any case, the long view of climate as seen above, is that it is chaotic, variable, and has been much hotter and much colder than now in the history of homo sapiens.

Now if we want to determine whether we are turning and going downhill, as in the medieval warm period going into the little ice age, or we are going up still as in the roman period, we can only speculate ( btw the plots are at rest in this link .
Look at the roman warm period, 0 AD. What would be a good climate interval that would tell us if we are going up or coming down slope? looks as if 20 to 30 years would do it. So we wait. And in the meantime take part in the fun on these blogs by speculating on weather. Whats bad about that?

The serious stuff is when people present analysis based on PDO and ENSO and all the rest of the alphabet soup ,and sun cycles etc and are threshed out with pros and cons . Stick around.

Hi Phil. yes I have been thinking that if you want to test exactly how much of the sun’s energy is reflected by carbon dioxide and compare that to how much of earth’s radiation is trapped by Co2 you will have to come up with some other kind of testing. In this experiment it is just to show that the 100 ppm Co2 do nothing and is in fact nothing compared to simple AHG.

barry (07:46:34) : that there is so much talk on climate trends and statistics, and none at all on what a statistically significant climate trend actually is. …

Seeing as a vast number of articles and comments at this site are premised on the assumption that short-term trends (< 14 years) are climatically significant, a post reinforcing this assumption is long overdue.

Well, I’d suggest at least a 10,000 year baseline. We know there are cycles that long ( interglacials ) that shift climate. After that you are looking at million year ranges of geographic changes. Short of 10,000 years? “I don’t think so, Tim”… We have 1500 year cyclicality ( Bond Events ) but that just changes weather for a while, not the climate ( Sahara stays a hot desert, Mediterranean stays mediterranean, Siberian arboreal stays arboreal, etc.)

I’ve done that and provided links. And it was in the context of short-term trends, which are the subject of much discussion here, and specifically on this thread. It is amazing that there is little awareness or even curiosity about a concept fundamental to so many discussions here: how much data do you need to distinguish a statistically valid climate trend from weather phenomena?

Well, I’d suggest at least a 10,000 year baseline. We know there are cycles that long ( interglacials ) that shift climate. After that you are looking at million year ranges of geographic changes. Short of 10,000 years? “I don’t think so, Tim”… We have 1500 year cyclicality ( Bond Events ) but that just changes weather for a while, not the climate ( Sahara stays a hot desert, Mediterranean stays mediterranean, Siberian arboreal stays arboreal, etc.)

I see. Then you would argue that ‘ the climate has been cooling since 1998’ is a bogus claim, and you would at the very least agree with me that all the comments here on describing global or regional temperature changes over one month, one year, or a decade… are deluded.

In my part of the world, the climate is constantly changing. We mark it with four seasons. We may be kidding ourselves…

BTW if we wanted to cool the planet there would be a very simple geoengineering approach: Desertification. Air humidity in the Sahara is usually at 3-4 percent, at most 30 percent. An easy way to bring down the dangerous accumulation of the most important greenhouse gas, water vapour. Sealing off large swaths of land with tarmac might help as well.

Go back and read my post carefully. Trying to focus on the definition of heat is irrelevant to my post and is but a red herring.

“It is not something (heat) that can propagate in the absence of molecules or atoms”.
This has nothing to do with my argument.

“But what CO2, and other GHGs such as H2O and methane CH4 can and do do in the atmosphere, is selectively intercept and absorb ENERGY in the form of Electromagnetic Radiation; treated either as a Photon stream or a wave as you prefer.”
The energy that CO2, H2O etc. absorbs has nothing to do with selective interception but has everything to with the physical properties of the gas involved. Measure the absorption spectra experimentally, repeat a number of times for verification and voila you have the natural absorption properties of that gas. This is a feature of nature and can’t be altered by you or anyone else.

“As to the consequence for the total energy balance of the planet; that it is a much more complicated issue, but to deny that CO2 “heats” the atmosphere as do other green house molecules, is not a fruitful pursuit.”
The real truth is that CO2 at less than .04 percent by volume with a specific heat capacity less than aluminum is woefully inadequate to even come close
to the ability of N2 and O2 to absorb and retain em radiation in the form of kinetic heat. Not wishing to face the facts is definitely not fruitful at all.
Why use an aluminum heatsink on a cpu? Because its cheap and it radiates heat quickly because of its specific heat content. Aluminum is lousy at retaining heat. Copper is even worse than aluminum at retaining heat which is why it is used on faster processors. Apparently real physics gets no respect at all from warmers.

The term feedback cannot be applied to the earth’s climate system since a feedback requires a closed system. Since there is no physical shell or barrier surrounding the earth and the exosphere is open to space allowing kinetic heat to escape, the term feedback is incorrect. I suppose you will try to make the analogy to blankets as I’ve seen in so many places. Also there is not enough CO2 in the atmosphere to block anything. It is a matter of proportion. Again, only proper experiments IN the atmosphere will settle the matter. Oh, and the earth and its atmosphere is NOT a greenhouse.

In short, the C02 as the earth’s thermostat is bunk. How much does CO2 at less than .04 percent contribute to the earth’s climate? Zero, zip, zilch, nil, nada. Good luck with your efforts to demonize CO2. The real facts speak otherwise.

Were you replying to me? Maybe your english is different than my english.

I was asking the question with respect to the linked plots, not with respect to the puny lengths of mine and your lifetime. Obviously you did not even look at the plots so bye bye. I wish there were an “ignore” function on these blogs.

“there is so much talk on climate trends and statistics, and none at all on what a statistically significant climate period actually is.”

Have a look at this series of enlarging scales of the temperature history of the planet and tell me what a statistically significant climate period is.

My definition would be: it depends on what you are studying. “

Yes, and so is Bob Carter’s, as we see in this other series of his.

What Barry is deliberately ignoring is that Dr. Carter is addressing the AGW loons on their own turf. THEY are the ones trying to squeeze “trends” out of short term data, and all he’s doing is saying that even that can’t be done.

I think this was in response to my assertion that Co2 also reflects or blocks sun light similar to the mechanism whereby we know or assume that ozone blocks UV light.
I said that because of this property there must be some cooling effect of Co2 which nobody seems to have properly ever investigated e.g. how much cooling and how much warming does Co2 really cause?

What Barry is deliberately ignoring is that Dr. Carter is addressing the AGW loons on their own turf. THEY are the ones trying to squeeze “trends” out of short term data, and all he’s doing is saying that even that can’t be done.

Carter said, “you can argue over what is a climatically significant period…”

But he presented no argument. No one here has.

anna,

My definition would be: it depends on what you are studying.

I am referring to thousands of comments here attaching the term ‘climate change’ to a months worth of data. Or a year’s worth. Or ten years. These periods are being studied by the regulars here in countless threads without ever bothering to establish or even question a fundamental concept:

At what point does a climate signal emerge from the noise of weather?

I have stated the opinion that the absolute minimum is 14 years, and a more reasonable period of 20 – 30 years, and provided links to statistics experts to support these figures.

It’s based on math. Statistical analysis.

I do not know how to make my query clearer. It is not I, or the ‘warmists’ who speak of a few months or several years of data being climatically significant. These periods are taken as statistically significant WRT to climate by the denizens of this and other skeptical blogs. If you need corroboration, scroll through this thread. As far as I know, no skeptic has ever attempted to demonstrate with math why they think a climate trend is statistically valid at anything less than 14 years, and yet shorter periods are constantly spoken of as if they are.

What Barry is deliberately ignoring is that Dr. Carter is addressing the AGW loons on their own turf. THEY are the ones trying to squeeze “trends” out of short term data

Carter is talking about 3-year and 9-year trends in the video you supplied. As evidenced in the links above, warmists say these are too short.

anna,

I am well aware, as paleoclimatologists are, that climate can be assessed on much longer time periods – but that is not the are of study I’m interested in. My question is about the short-term trends popular amongst skeptics. Surely you are familiar with the ‘cooling since 1998’ meme that’s been bandied about for the last few years. If you agree with me that this is too short a period to consider climatically significant, would you be happy to say so directly?

barry (04:27:18) :
At what point does a climate signal emerge from the noise of weather?
I have stated the opinion that the absolute minimum is 14 years, and a more reasonable period of 20 – 30 years, and provided links to statistics experts to support these figures.

It’s based on math. Statistical analysis.

I do not know how to make my query clearer. It is not I, or the ‘warmists’ who speak of a few months or several years of data being climatically significant. These periods are taken as statistically significant WRT to climate by the denizens of this and other skeptical blogs. If you need corroboration, scroll through this thread. As far as I know, no skeptic has ever attempted to demonstrate with math why they think a climate trend is statistically valid at anything less than 14 years, and yet shorter periods are constantly spoken of as if they are.

Show me the maths. Here are the links again for an example.
20 – 30 years
14 year minimum

I have to agree with this. One of Barry’s links is to Tamino’s blog – unfortunately (and annoyingly) Tamino is correct. Leaving aside the statistical analysis, logic tells you that, if TSI varies by ~0.1% (~0.07 deg C) over the period of a solar cycle, then you need at least the length of a solar cycle to determine the underlying trend. There are also ENSO fluctuations to consider. Many of the recent short term trends have been influenced by the transistion from El Nino to La Nina (2002/03 -> 2007/08).

A lot has been made of the “cooling since 1998” but that may well be coming to an end. The UAH trend since 1998 could well go positive in the next few months and although, this is not likely to be statistically significant, even that may change by 2012, i.e. by the end of Tamino’s 14 year ‘minimum period’ for a trend.

My question is about the short-term trends popular amongst skeptics. Surely you are familiar with the ‘cooling since 1998′ meme that’s been bandied about for the last few years. If you agree with me that this is too short a period to consider climatically significant, would you be happy to say so directly?

The cautious amongst us make the more modest claim that the trend has been flat since 2002. That’s simply an observation, not necessarily a claim that a long-term flat trend has been established. It’s significance lies in the following:

1. Its correlation with the cresting at about that point in the 30-year PDO cycle. (See Dr. Akasofu’s paper (a long PDF) at http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/little_ice_age.php .) Since we believe these multi-decadal cycles are what were responsible for the flat-to-cooling trend from 1942 to 1978, and a prior cooling trend from before and during the start of the 20th century, we take this current pause as a likely harbinger of another cooling period.

2. The doubt such a pause casts on current alarmist claims that the trend is up, given that their claims prior to 2002 that the trend was relentlessly up (under a business-as-usual scenario) have been falsified. For instance, the trend of temperatures over the Noughties falls below the 0.2 degrees C / decade trendline of Hansen and the IPCC’s “Business as Usual” projections from before 2002. (E.g., Hansen’s 1988 Scenario “A”.) It’s my impression that the alarmists back then were not allowing for more than two or three years of slack in their models. Everything that happened was due to a “forcing,” and they had all the important forcings accounted for, so they thought. If they had been asked back then to estimate the probability of an eight-year flat trend, they’d have said, I infer, “less than 10%.”

This weakens their case that CO2 is as an important a factor in the global temperature as they think. Or at least it indicates their models, which failed to allow for a lengthy slack period, are not as reliable as claimed.

Nailing down just exactly how much slack the alarmists were allowing for back then would be a fruitful area for both sides to research, to help resolve how damaging (or not) this pause is to the AGW hypothesis.

PS: I have often preached that it is wise to avoid overstatement, because it gives the other side an opportunity to refute the overstated part of the claim and seem thereby to have disposed of the matter entirely. It’s like handing them a strawman to knock down. If our side made a habit of phrasing its claims in a more lawyerly, guarded fashion, this wouldn’t occur.

OTOH, it should be evident to warmists that skeptics’ talk about a recent cooling or flat trend can’t be dismissed as outrageous because short-term trends mean nothing. Such pauses do mean something, because warmists had earlier implied that they were very unlikely to occur.

Here’s an analogy. Let’s say there is an auto race, and a backer of the car named “Carbon” claims that it so far outclasses the rest of the field that it will “lap” them every 20 times around the course, on average. He therefore predicts that after 100 laps it will have lapped the field five times. Further, his prediction is correct after the first 20 laps. (I.e., from 1978 to 1998.)

However, after the next ten laps, it gains no further ground, and even loses a bit. Critics of the carbon backer then say this makes his prediction that his favorite will win by five laps look like a bad bet. (I.e., this implies that the correct public policy would be “wait and see” rather than “tax and spend.”)

Carbon backer can’t wave their observation aside by saying that it doesn’t count because there are always short-term surges and fades in the course of a race. That’s a strawman. A ten-lap hiatus does not disprove the idea that the carbon car may get a second wind and pick up the pace again. Claiming that that is the point in dispute and brushing it aside is knocking down a strawman.

What such a hiatus should and does do is considerably lower our degree of conviction in carbon-backer’s initial claim of a relentless outpacing of the field, and warn us to keep our wallet in our pocket, rather than backing his bet.

The term feedback is more complicated than my simple statement and is more relevant to electronics than the earth’s atmosphere. Is there an experiment in the atmosphere that confirms the postulated feedback by climate scientists?
Do we know for 100 per cent certainty that these feedbacks are occuring or are they real because a computer model and some impressive graphics on a computer screen say so? And who said math and models were a replacement for hardcore experiments anyway? You know climate scientists are better off renting a hot air baloon, loading it with some gear and take a nice long tour while recording some data. How about measurements above and below a cloud layer? Design a experiment to simply tour around anywhere in the atmosphere and continuously record data. Far better than spending countless hours in front of a computer. From my point of view, for the money spent so far on the whole warming thing current climate science is inept. Replace all the climate quacks with engineers then maybe we will get somewhere.

Henry Poole (22:34:52)

I totally agree with you on “some cooling effect” but not from blocking. It’s related to the proportion of CO2 and its measured specific heat content, .04% represents really a very tiny mass. There simply isn’t enough of it to “get in the way”. On the other hand its specific heat content says that, because it’s poor at retaining kinetic energy it can’t possibly have a warming effect especially at .04% concentration by volume. The tiny tiny effect that it does have is more cooling than warming. This is why warmers have had to resort to some kind of amplification. Overall, compared to the concentration O2 (220,000ppm), N2 (750,000ppm) and water vapor (max 40,000ppm) CO2 has no sensible effect on the climate at all.

I have had some considerable discussions as to how the “blocking” or “trapping” of radiation works. Let us take ozone as example. Ozone blocks (or reflects) UV from the sun from 0 up to a certain wave length. At between 12 and 13 it blocks a considerable amount of radiation coming from earth. The reason why we don’t hear any complaints from the warmists about ozone is probably because the net effect is cooling but I would not know this for sure. Did anyone do any testing? I could not find anything. The same applies to CO2.
If you look at the spectra, then you can see that there is absorption, exactly where there is blocking (or reflection). My understanding of what exactly happens is this: The gas absorbs one or more photons (at that wavelength area where it absorbs) and at this stage the molecule becomes sort of like a mirror at that wavelength area. So it starts reflecting the light there and because of the random position we can say that about 50% of that radiation (of that wavelength area) is send back to space. If you look at the definition of the greenhouse effect , it mentions that 50% is send back to earth/ trapped so to speak. I have to believe that something like this is happening, because as I showed you, they can even measure that radiation from CO2 when it reflects back from the moon.
But now what I cannot understand is that nobody has ever looked at CO2 and tried to work out or test how much cooling (by blocking or reflecting light at the relevant wavelengths from the sun) and how much warming by trapping earth’s radiation (mostly at between 14 and 15) is caused by the carbon dioxide. I think to me it looks it could be 50-50 and like you say, the quantity (of the increase of 0.01%) is so small that it cannot possibly very relevant. That is what my instinct tells me. But if there is so much discussions going on about it, why is there no money for this to reasearch this? I don’t understand that.

this CO2 temperature widget is funny: anomaly +0.72K , arrow down. What does this mean, arrow down? Is this an error?

@topic
there were many signs for a new January record. Not surprising: warming in the last 12 years + favourable conditions (El Nino, but not as strong as 1997/98) = record. But is just a month… let’s see what happens in the next years, but the chances are good, the warming trend will continue. Unfortunately.

@just you
Unfortunately? I have several friends in the NH who would love it a bit warmer. They have the (white) evidence of “global warming” lying in front of their houses for weeks now. I told them that the trend from 2003 is cooling. All indicators have gone that way.
So (unfortunately) it is really going to get colder. Read all of my entries in this post and you may find out why…..

I think our difference lies in that I do not think that even 30 or 60 years are enough to average a climate behavior out of weather behavior. It is not just statistics.
By the Nyquist sampling theorem as the PDO has a 30 year frequency at least we need at least 180 years to get a true climate out of the weather data. See the thread :

Besides, you said there was new material, as in state of the art stuff. Dawkins just regurgitates old spew, albeit in new and colorful ways. Lee Spetner shows where Dawkins, and many others, are not just wrong, but would almost have to be deliberately so to come up with such outlandish nonsense.

Again, you intimated that some state of the art material existed. If you have any QUANTITATIVE proof, that’s what I want to see, not some deceptive stoaty “proofs” that are really just so much smoke and mirrors.

As I said before, I think the warmers probably learned a lot of their propaganda techniques from the evolutionists. I’m guessing that because most scientists are brainwashed to have that kind of mindset, is why the true believing warmers have gotten away with their scam for so long.

yonason (11:58:29) :Dawkins just regurgitates old spew, albeit in new and colorful ways.
So, you bought the two books and read them carefully.
To prove that tell us what the first word on page 100 is for both.

If you think a climate signal emerges after 180 years, do you ever take issue with people talking about climate on shorter trends?

How about the post from Roger Knights just below my last one.

The cautious amongst us make the more modest claim that the trend has been flat since 2002. That’s simply an observation, not necessarily a claim that a long-term flat trend has been established. It’s significance lies in the following

(PDO)

The cautious amongst the skeptics see climatic significance in a 7 year trend. Mainstream science posits a 20-30 year period as a reasonable period to establish if there’s a climate trend. Roger continues:

This weakens their case that CO2 is as an important a factor in the global temperature as they think. Or at least it indicates their models, which failed to allow for a lengthy slack period, are not as reliable as claimed.

He’s talking conflating short-term trends with climate change.

(Knights is incorrect about the models. A number of runs that end up in the middle of projections by 2100, have 10 and even 20 year flat or slightly cooling trends in various parts of the 21st century, some even for the current period. The usual mistake is to point to model ensemble means in the IPCC, which are smoothed to emphasise the climate signal, and do not show interannual variability – but that’s another topic)

From earlier in this thread:

Jason S (15:30:25) :

A tie with 98 El Nino is a loss to the AGW hypothesis. If global warming was going on unabated, how come 12 years later we aren’t .12C+ higher than the 98 El Nino?

Amino says:

?What does mean something is there’s been longer winters all over the world for 3 years in a row. Florida got froze for days on end. Europe is freezing. China has huge snow. And this year could be another year of record snow in the US.

The average person may be saying “What global warming?”

Mainstream AGW is about 20-30 year climate periods, not 3 years.

Looks like global warming has resumed.

I’m not complaining though.

One month’s data.

yonason posted a video of Bob Carter talking about a 3 year trend as if it was climatically significant.

I don’t need to go hunting through this blog for old posts. I am sure you will be aware that the very cool January 08 anomaly garnered umpteen posts on how that month’s anomaly had made a serious dent in AGW – climate change, that is. Same goes for ocean heat content – 5 or 6 years of data for the implied argument that global warming (global climate change) has stopped.

Likewise a heap of posts saying “there’s snow out my window today – what global warming?” (That’s a day or a week, not to mention it aint global)

Or the 2 to 3 months last year when the global sea ice area anomaly went above the baseline.

Whenever climattically significant periods are talked about, skpetics will posit (or imply) that significance is anywhere from a few days to 10 000 years (cf E.M. smith).

The ‘area of study’ at this blog is the claims made by the AGW crowd, which is about the action of CO2 (and the other climate drivers, of course) over the last century or so. The question remains – when does a climate signal emerge from weather noise, and specifically to warming from increased CO2?

No skeptic has ever tried to falsify the statistical analyses done to determine the climatic periods. There is a lot of hand-waving, but no number-crunching. And there is no consistency amongst the skeptical camp – except that a climatic period can be whatever you like, as long as it buttresses your point. How can this possibly be persuasive against verifiable maths?

You made a statement that I refuted in my 08:59:28 post. Your example was one of correlation, not of causation. I provided a citation giving an equally plausible alternate explanation. Therefore, your conclusion is simply an opinion. It is not empirical evidence showing that CO2 is the cause of a rising global temperature.

Maybe you haven’t read all my posts, but I have repeatedly asked someone, anyone, to provide empirical evidence specifically demonstrating, in a testable manner, that an X increase in CO2 results in an X increase in global temperature.

Because that is what the entire debate is about: CO2=CAGW. Everything else is extraneous. If the CO2 catastrophe hypothesis fails, then the entire AGW edifice comes crashing down.

As a skeptic I am not saying — and I never have said — that CO2 causes no warming at all. The physics seems sound. But the essential question is: how much warming? The IPCC’s ridiculously inflated sensitivity number has no relation to observed reality. And if, as seems very likely at this point, the sensitivity number is anything less than one, then CO2 is inconsequential and can be disregarded for all practical purposes.

The climate alarmist crowd claims that the rise in CO2 will cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe. They cannot back down from that claim. Because if it turns out, as appears very likely, that the effect of CO2 is insignificant, then there is no reason to spend any more money on mitigation, on grants, or on anything else connected with the CAGW hypothesis. More than $50 billion has been wasted on this non-problem, and many other branches of science have been starved of funding as a direct result.

If you can give me real evidence showing that a specific rise in CO2 causes measurable warming, I’ll sit up straight and pay attention. But your example above does not rise to the level of evidence showing that CO2 is the predominant cause of global warming.

Either the planet is heating up catastrophically due to rising CO2, or the planet is well within the parameters of natural climate variability, and beneficial carbon dioxide is only a harmless trace gas. Based on real world observations, the latter appears to be the case.

These remarks of yours are not really very constructive.
Admittedly, we are not all as clever as you are. Please enlighten us with your knowledge and understanding.

Well it’s not exactly the first time I’ve refuted similar misconceptions on here, it gets a little tiresome after a while! Since I haven’t seen you post here on this subject before I’ll do it again.

Henry Pool (09:46:01) :
Brian:

I have had some considerable discussions as to how the “blocking” or “trapping” of radiation works. Let us take ozone as example. Ozone blocks (or reflects) UV from the sun from 0 up to a certain wave length. At between 12 and 13 it blocks a considerable amount of radiation coming from earth.

Molecular Oxygen absorbs UV at wavelengths up to 242nm in the stratosphere which causes it to break up into two oxygen atoms, when these oxygen atoms collide with an oxygen molecule they form an ozone molecule (O3). The region in the atmosphere where this production is favored is called the ozone layer, the ozone absorbs (not reflects!) UV light in the range 240-320nm. This warms the lower stratosphere but the reduction of ozone over recent decades has led to a relative cooling there.
Ozone also absorbs in the IR and on the following image you’ll see the ozone absorption at about 1000 cm^-1, note that it’s much less than CO2 (not considerable).

The reason why we don’t hear any complaints from the warmists about ozone is probably because the net effect is cooling but I would not know this for sure. Did anyone do any testing? I could not find anything.

There’s plenty of postings about ozone, mainly about the effect of its depletion and our role in that.

The same applies to CO2.
If you look at the spectra, then you can see that there is absorption, exactly where there is blocking (or reflection). My understanding of what exactly happens is this: The gas absorbs one or more photons (at that wavelength area where it absorbs) and at this stage the molecule becomes sort of like a mirror at that wavelength area. So it starts reflecting the light there and because of the random position we can say that about 50% of that radiation (of that wavelength area) is send back to space. If you look at the definition of the greenhouse effect , it mentions that 50% is send back to earth/ trapped so to speak. I have to believe that something like this is happening, because as I showed you, they can even measure that radiation from CO2 when it reflects back from the moon.

Almost totally wrong!
CO2 strongly absorbs IR from the earth in the large band centered on ~650nm (see above). The excited CO2 thus created is sufficiently long lasting that in the lower troposphere that it gives up its energy to colliding N2 and O2 molecules thereby heating the atmosphere, only higher up in the atmosphere where the pressure is lower does radiation become significant. The direction of the radiation is random so ~half is to space.There is no reflection by CO2!

But now what I cannot understand is that nobody has ever looked at CO2 and tried to work out or test how much cooling (by blocking or reflecting light at the relevant wavelengths from the sun) and how much warming by trapping earth’s radiation (mostly at between 14 and 15) is caused by the carbon dioxide. I think to me it looks it could be 50-50 and like you say, the quantity (of the increase of 0.01%) is so small that it cannot possibly very relevant. That is what my instinct tells me. But if there is so much discussions going on about it, why is there no money for this to reasearch this? I don’t understand that.

I don’t know why you’d state this, there must have been hundreds of papers on this by now, start off by looking for V Ramanathan at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, he was one of the first to put this all together in the 70s. As you’ll see from the above graph the effect of CO2 is far from negligible.

If you think a climate signal emerges after 180 years, do you ever take issue with people talking about climate on shorter trends?

She was talking about the need to filter out the 60-year PDO cycle in order to obtain a signal about longer lasting trends. If you consider the PDO cycle to be a climate factor, because its effects persist for decades, then a much shorter-term is OK. Here’s what she said:

Anna: My definition would be: it depends on what you are studying. Climate is average weather, how big the averaging interval is depends on what one is studying. …

Now if we want to determine whether we are turning and going downhill, as in the medieval warm period going into the little ice age, or we are going up still as in the roman period, we can only speculate … .

Look at the roman warm period, 0 AD. What would be a good climate interval that would tell us if we are going up or coming down slope? looks as if 20 to 30 years would do it.

Well, we’ve had a 20-year up-leg (1978 to 1998) and a ten-year flattish trend. It looks like things could well be cresting and heading down for another 20 years, then another ten-year flattish trend, in phase with the down-leg and reversal of the PDO.

Barry: How about the post from Roger Knights just below my last one.

RK: The cautious amongst us make the more modest claim that the trend has been flat since 2002. That’s simply an observation, not necessarily a claim that a long-term flat trend has been established. It’s significance lies in the following

(PDO)

Barry: [sarc] The cautious amongst the skeptics see climatic significance in a 7 year trend.[/sarc]
That’s your strawman. A skeptic need do no more than falsify (or shoot holes in) a claimant’s hypothesis, which a flat-trend tends to do. As I wrote, it “casts doubt” and it “weakens the case.” I wasn’t implying there was anything more than a possible long-term, or climatic, significance in a 7-year flat trend, given that the PDO is turning, as I just wrote above.

What I stressed as the gravamen of my charge was that there is “anti-climatic” significance in it. I.e., it falsifies, or tends to falsify, the alarmists’ erstwhile implication of a tight link between rising CO2 and rising temperatures. This tight link was “the horse they rode in on” during the 80s and 90s, when such a tight link existed. They weren’t saying then that it could have been mere correlation. They took it as a striking confirmation of their theories. They made hay with the visual impact the tight correlation of the lines on their charts. So they set themselves up for a fall when those lines diverged.

Barry: Mainstream science posits a 20-30 year period as a reasonable period to establish if there’s a climate trend.

And mainstream science is wrong. Since 1998 it’s been known that the length of the PDO is 60-some years. Using a 20-30 year cycle as significant will (and has) misled the mainstream into thinking that the recent 20-year upleg (1978 to 1998) heralds an unstoppable uptrend, rather than merely being an up-leg (warm phase) of the PDO.

Barry: Roger continues:

This weakens their case that CO2 is as an important a factor in the global temperature as they think. Or at least it indicates their models, which failed to allow for a lengthy slack period, are not as reliable as claimed.

Nope, I’m pointing to an inconvenient truth — if you “live” by a two-decadal warming trend, and keep claiming “it’s unstoppable (under business as usual),” you’ll “die,” or at least be lamed, and deservedly, if there’s a one-decadal “stoppage” (such as has just occurred).

Barry: (Knights is incorrect about the models. A number of runs that end up in the middle of projections by 2100, have 10 and even 20 year flat or slightly cooling trends in various parts of the 21st century, some even for the current period. The usual mistake is to point to model ensemble means in the IPCC, which are smoothed to emphasise the climate signal, and do not show interannual variability – but that’s another topic)

This looks like an attempt to levitate the alarmists out of the corner they have painted themselves into. I’m sure a few of the modelers left themselves an “out” back in the day, because it’s “not done” in scenario-building to say that any outcome is impossible. Everything is a matter of probabilities.

But the odds they’d have offered on a stoppage coming to pass so soon would have been (I infer) low (under 10%). Hansen certainly implied a relentless warming on a decadal scale. And so did all the others who piped up, when they used short-term events (Arctic sea ice, Wilkins shelf, Katrina, a bad couple of tornado years, coral bleaching, drought in Atlanta, etc.) as confirmations of their forecasts.

My inference above needs to be robustified. I hope a few skeptics will document this. As I wrote:

“Nailing down just exactly how much slack the alarmists were allowing for back then would be a fruitful area for both sides to research, to help resolve how damaging (or not) this pause is to the AGW hypothesis.”

“yonason (11:58:29) :
Dawkins just regurgitates old spew, albeit in new and colorful ways.
So, you bought the two books and read them carefully.
To prove that tell us what the first word on page 100 is for both.”

I never said I’ve read all his material. I’ve seen enough material of his quoted which tells me he’s the Al Gore of Evolution. If I see that a book contains obvious falsehoods, or misleading information, I’m not going to waste money or time on it.

The best chance evolution may have is in what’s referred to as the “RNA-World” hypothesis. (Note – they are honest enough to call it an hypothesis, rather that either a “theory” or “fact.”) And, if that’s true, a lot of what currently is being referred to as “fact” will be shown not to be. I.e., it isn’t “established.”

The only reason I brought that up is because of the connection I see between warmism and evolutionism.

An example of how evolutionists lie like warmers is the “nylon bug.” We’re led to believe that it’s (1) unique, and (2) that it metabolizes nylon, and so that is proof that the mutations in the gene of that singular bug randomly generated a brand new activity never seen before.

Nonsense. First, it isn’t unique. There are no fewer than 11 other bacteria in 7 genera that have the same activity, AND second, while they only metabolize the monomers and dimers (with minimal activity for trimers) they have no activity whatever against nylon itself, which is the long chain polymer. But, there are 2 fungi that do degrade the polymer itself. (Also, those bacteria are among the ones commonly used in Bioremediation, the technology of detoxifying some of the nastiest human waste, almost as if they were “designed” to do just that.)

That’s just one example of how deception permeates scientific thinking, and has been poisoned it. Evolutionists distort facts to create false impressions, and refuse to acknowledge weaknesses that are far from resolved. There is no “established fact,” not yet. And saying so just feeds the “believe any seemingly possible fantasy” mind set that got us into this AGW quagmire to begin with.

and follow the instructions. You end up by getting a preview function for CA, for Watts up and for Lucia’s blackboard. Works well.

Now about the intervals, yes I take exception with people talking about climate in terms of less than the intervals between the MWP and the LIA. I think all the finer details are chaotic weather, control by the confluences of the alphabet soup of ocean currents and atmospheric currents ( PDO, ENSO etc) as Tsonis et al have shown.

Now you are wrong about the models. The models that appeared in the IPCC report were carefully vetted to show only the increases, and those are the ones that tried to stampede the world into economic harakiri with 90% confidence levels.

Of course there are runs within the errors that show flatness and I am sure there are runs that show cooling, because the errors are huge and were hidden under the rug, no propagation of errors was done. Just a sphaghetti graph around the best values that each model chose by feel ( it is written in black and white in the AR4 report chapter 8).

After the data started to falsify their published in the IPCC predictions, they came out with new fits. But as von Neumann said, with four parameters I can fit any function, with five an elephant, or something like that. The IPCC GCMs have a plethora of parameters.

yonason (10:11:47) :I never said I’ve read all his material. I’ve seen enough material of his quoted
Have you read any? ‘quoted’ is a giveaway that you have not looked into this yourself, but are just regurgitating [your word] other people’s misguided opinions. You are, of course, entitled to adhere to anything you like, but spare us, please.

Like Missingo before (read my posts) you have not really studied the solar spectra just before it reaches the atmosphere and just on top of sea level. Where did the missing radiation between the two spectra exactly go (unless reflected)?
If CO2 does not reflect how come we can measure the CO2 as it reflects off the moon? (Again, refer to my post to Brian on this and study the referred report where they analysed the earthshine from the moon).

Roger Knights (08:57:34) :
And mainstream science is wrong. Since 1998 it’s been known that the length of the PDO is 60-some years. Using a 20-30 year cycle as significant will (and has) misled the mainstream into thinking that the recent 20-year upleg (1978 to 1998) heralds an unstoppable uptrend, rather than merely being an up-leg (warm phase) of the PDO.

Really, then kindly explain why the PDO Index doesn’t appear to show that?
Do you think that a total record of 110 years would be enough to establish that?

Like Missingo before (read my posts) you have not really studied the solar spectra just before it reaches the atmosphere and just on top of sea level. Where did the missing radiation between the two spectra exactly go (unless reflected)?

On the contrary I have studied it, the difference is due to absorption and subsequent thermalisation. As I told you before your ‘experiments’ are flawed and do not represent the physical processes involved in heating and cooling the atmosphere.

If CO2 does not reflect how come we can measure the CO2 as it reflects off the moon?

CO2 high in the stratosphere emits radiation (IR) thereby cooling the stratosphere, a well known fingerprint of the GH effect.

You see, if carbon dioxide traps infra red radiation from earth (keeping us warm) then it must follow that carbon dioxide also shields us from the sun (similar to ozone blocking UV and water vapor blocking IR).

That does not ‘follow’, the wavelength ranges of the solar spectrum and the Earth’s BB spectrum are different and the absorption by CO2 in each is different, there is no strong band in the solar spectrum comparable with the 15μm band. In any case incoming solar absorbed by CO2 will warm the atmosphere just the same as if it heated the ground first.

If I look carefully at the spectra I would say it is close to 50/50 i.e. it cools as much (by reflecting radiation from the sun) as it causes warming in the 14-15 um range by trapping radiation from earth …

You are mistaken, the absorption by CO2 at ~2μm is in the tail of the solar spectrum is nowhere near the absorption at 15μm, and in any case it doesn’t causes cooling.

Henry@Phil
“On the contrary I have studied it, the difference is due to absorption and subsequent thermalisation”.
This is where we differ in opinion. It cannot happen like that because the nature of light is that it has to keep moving. There is some absorption and thermalisation but only up to the point as to where the molecule becomes saturated and it cannot accept any more photons.It is here where it becomes like a crystal or mirror at that wavelength, not allowing more light to get through. Note the IR heat from the sun on your skin on a sunny day here in Africa and wait for the humidity to go up: the heat on your skin becomes less. Where did the IR go? Into the water vapor? All of it? Continuously? For up to how long? Anyway it is common knowledge that:
“About 30 percent of the sunlight that beams toward Earth is deflected by the outer atmosphere and scattered back into space. The rest reaches the planet’s surface and is reflected upward again as a type of slow-moving energy called infrared radiation.” Also note the extract of the report that I quoted:http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X/629/2/1175/61819.web.pdf?request-id=d5c8def3-e610-4d2f-86ed-8436340aca4a
How do you explain the conclusion, namely that CO2 is a powerful probe in the near infra red? That most certainly conflicts with your statement that there is no reflection of CO2 and thus no cooling effect.
I have to beg to differ from opinion and I stay with my observation that nobody has proven to me yet that the net effect of CO2 is warming and not cooling or what the ratio between the warming and cooling really is.

Henry @ Phil
Quote from Wikipedia (on the interpretation of the greenhouse effect);

“The Earth’s surface and the clouds absorb visible and invisible radiation from the sun and re-emit much of the energy as infrared back to the atmosphere. Certain substances in the atmosphere, chiefly cloud droplets and water vapor, but also carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, and chlorofluorocarbons, absorb this infrared, and re-radiate it in all directions including back to Earth.”

My interpretation of re-radiation:

Water and carbon dioxide behave similarly when exposed to infra red radiation. Each molecule excepts one or more photons. Once this transaction is completed the molecule becomes sort of like a little mirror or crystal this infra red radiation and the molecules start reflecting that infra red. Because of the random position of the molecules we may assume that at least 50% of the infra red coming from earth is radiated back to earth. The process then repeats itself.

Henry@Phil
“CO2 high in the stratosphere emits radiation (IR) thereby cooling the stratosphere, a well known fingerprint of the GH effect”

You admit that there is some cooling. We are getting there. But this statement also does not make sense to me. Namely, we know for sure that unlike some other gases, Co2 is completely diffused into the air, i.e. its concentration from the top to the bottom and from the east to the west is more or less exactly the same. So the cooling effect and warming effect of CO2 (by reflecting radiation) must be similar? (for radiation, distance is not really a factor – it always just carries on going in straight lines from wherever it was send or deflected)

Also, in a well designed experiment I would like to see water vapor introduced as a factor because we know that water also absorbs in the 14-15 um range. We should know what the influence of this is, at various concentrations close to the earth’s average water vapor content.

But like I said, it seems nobody has any money for this. I would actually like someone to sue the oil companies and see how quickly they would find the money to do this research.

Roger Knights (08:57:34) :
And mainstream science is wrong. Since 1998 it’s been known that the length of the PDO is 60-some years. Using a 20-30 year cycle as significant will (and has) misled the mainstream into thinking that the recent 20-year upleg (1978 to 1998) heralds an unstoppable uptrend, rather than merely being an up-leg (warm phase) of the PDO.

Really, then kindly explain why the PDO Index doesn’t appear to show that?
Do you think that a total record of 110 years would be enough to establish that?

Go here (to the “parent” page of the link you provided): http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo There you’ll find the paragraph below, which points out that while there were four PDO “events” or “regimes” (i.e., two uplegs plus two downlegs) during this period, there were (therefore) “just two full PDO cycles in the past century”.

Therefore I was correct in saying that “the length of the PDO is 60-some years,” that a 20- or 30-year period refers only to its warm or cool phase, and that to mistake such a half-period as a long-term trend is mistaken:

The “Pacific Decadal Oscillation” (PDO) is a long-lived El Niño-like pattern of Pacific climate variability. While the two climate oscillations have similar spatial climate fingerprints, they have very different behavior in time. Fisheries scientist Steven Hare coined the term “Pacific Decadal Oscillation” (PDO) in 1996 while researching connections between Alaska salmon production cycles and Pacific climate (his dissertation topic with advisor Robert Francis).

Two main characteristics distinguish PDO from El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO): first, 20th century PDO “events” persisted for 20-to-30 years, while typical ENSO events persisted for 6 to 18 months; second, the climatic fingerprints of the PDO are most visible in the North Pacific/North American sector, while secondary signatures exist in the tropics – the opposite is true for ENSO.

Several independent studies find evidence for just two full PDO cycles in the past century: “cool” PDO regimes prevailed from 1890-1924 and again from 1947-1976, while “warm” PDO regimes dominated from 1925-1946 and from 1977 through (at least) the mid-1990’s. Shoshiro Minobe has shown that 20th century PDO fluctuations were most energetic in two general periodicities, one from 15-to-25 years, and the other from 50-to-70 years.http://ingrid.ldeo.columbia.edu/%28/home/alexeyk/mydata/TSsvd.in%29readfile/.SST/.PDO/

Peter of sydney, surely you dont really think that NASA landed people on the moon? Like AGW, its just another example of a science conspiracy, along with Y2K, and the idiotic ozone hole over Australia. NASA has not been able to prove they did it – the indian images of the landing sites could be anything and emeritus professor Maksporitov, head of the Kazakstan institute of public affairs and governance, has written a definitive paper outlining 10 reasons why the basic physics show that space travel is not possible. And of course nobody trusts anything NASA says.

Henry Pool (21:23:07) :
Henry@Phil
“On the contrary I have studied it, the difference is due to absorption and subsequent thermalisation”.
This is where we differ in opinion.

It’s not my opinion, it’s a scientific fact!

It cannot happen like that because the nature of light is that it has to keep moving. There is some absorption and thermalisation but only up to the point as to where the molecule becomes saturated and it cannot accept any more photons.It is here where it becomes like a crystal or mirror at that wavelength, not allowing more light to get through.

This is nonsense, saturation of the absorption (when it occurs) does not mean that the gas molecules start to reflect!

“About 30 percent of the sunlight that beams toward Earth is deflected by the outer atmosphere and scattered back into space. The rest reaches the planet’s surface and is reflected upward again as a type of slow-moving energy called infrared radiation.”

This ‘common knowledge’ as you term it is totally wrong!
About 30% of incoming solar is scattered by clouds or reflected by the surface back into space. The remainder is absorbed by the atmosphere or the surface, and black body radiation (IR) from the warmed surface radiates outwards (it is not ‘slow-moving’, it travels at the speed of light!).

How do you explain the conclusion, namely that CO2 is a powerful probe in the near infra red? That most certainly conflicts with your statement that there is no reflection of CO2 and thus no cooling effect.

No it doesn’t, CO2 absorbs and under the right conditions emits IR, it doesn’t reflect!

I have to beg to differ from opinion and I stay with my observation that nobody has proven to me yet that the net effect of CO2 is warming and not cooling or what the ratio between the warming and cooling really is.

Well if you make it up instead of reading the science (a first year undergraduate text on Physical Chemistry, particularly on spectroscopy would help), and ignore what you’re being told then I’m not surprised.

“The Earth’s surface and the clouds absorb visible and invisible radiation from the sun and re-emit much of the energy as infrared back to the atmosphere. Certain substances in the atmosphere, chiefly cloud droplets and water vapor, but also carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, and chlorofluorocarbons, absorb this infrared, and re-radiate it in all directions including back to Earth.”

My interpretation of re-radiation:

Is wrong, IR is absorbed and promotes the rotational and vibrational states of the molecule to a higher energy, this energy is lost either by collisions with other molecules or by radiating a photon of either the same or lesser energy. It does not reflect light

Henry Pool (23:04:06) :
Henry@Phil
“CO2 high in the stratosphere emits radiation (IR) thereby cooling the stratosphere, a well known fingerprint of the GH effect”

You admit that there is some cooling.

I don’t ‘admit’ anything! I state what has been known for years that high in the atmosphere radiational cooling by CO2 and other GH gases takes place.
See for example Clough and Iacono:
Clough, S.A. and M.J. Iacono. Line-By-Line Calculations of Atmospheric Fluxes and Cooling Rates 2: Application to Carbon Dioxide, Ozone, Methane, Nitrous Oxide and the Halocarbons. J. Geophys. Res., 100, 16519-16535, 1995.http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/20c.html

We are getting there. But this statement also does not make sense to me. Namely, we know for sure that unlike some other gases, Co2 is completely diffused into the air, i.e. its concentration from the top to the bottom and from the east to the west is more or less exactly the same. So the cooling effect and warming effect of CO2 (by reflecting radiation) must be similar?

Its mixing ratio is the same, its partial pressure however is much lower at high altitudes therefore the collision frequency is much lower and the CO2 molecule has more chance to emit IR.

Also, in a well designed experiment I would like to see water vapor introduced as a factor because we know that water also absorbs in the 14-15 um range. We should know what the influence of this is, at various concentrations close to the earth’s average water vapor content.

This is well known, H2O doesn’t absorb much in the 15μm band due to the sparse line spectrum:
The top spectrum is H2O.

But like I said, it seems nobody has any money for this. I would actually like someone to sue the oil companies and see how quickly they would find the money to do this research.

Plenty of money has been spent on this, the HITRAN database for instance, started in the 60s.

Phil
They do experiments at school and college where they use 100% CO2 to prove global warming is caused by CO2. I think we had a whole story of that on WUWT.
Do you approve of that experiment? If you want to stay in the corner with your books, be my guest. Sorry if I cannot help you/

Otherwise:

You say: “My interpretation of re-radiation is wrong. IR is absorbed and promotes the rotational and vibrational states of the molecule to a higher energy, this energy is lost either by collisions with other molecules or by radiating a photon of either the same or lesser energy. It does not reflect”

I put it to you that you do not understand the nature of light. Some energy is exchanged.. But then, radiation keeps moving. It cannot “stop”. So if you say that it does not reflect than I say OK, it radiates back. It is just a different word. Because of the random position about 50% of that radiation is returned to earth.You can feel this actually, coming down on you, here, if it is a very humid night. So what is my point?
The same thing happens in the atmosphere (as I explained: in all spheres!) where the sun hits on the CO2 molecule and the light is radiated back to space for at least 50% there where CO2 has absorptions in the UV, visible, near infra-red and infra red (4 um). They can measure this radiation as it bounces off the moon coming back to earth! So there is no point in denying it.
What I want to know (and I thought you could help me!) is what the cooling and warming is at those particular concentrations of CO2 that are relevant i.e. 200–500 ppm in W/m2 per 12 hours sunlight (cooling) and in W/m2 per 24 hours earthlight(warming) with a standard test.
I put it to you that no one has tested this.Preferably I would also include water vapor in my testing because I think that the warming of CO2 compares to virtually nothing when we start adding water vapor..

Henry Pool (06:57:00) :
Phil
They do experiments at school and college where they use 100% CO2 to prove global warming is caused by CO2. I think we had a whole story of that on WUWT.
Do you approve of that experiment? If you want to stay in the corner with your books, be my guest. Sorry if I cannot help you/

No I’ve criticized that experiment on many occasions, like your ‘experiments’ it has nothing to do with global warming. And judging by your writing you can’t help me with anything scientific.

You say: “My interpretation of re-radiation is wrong. IR is absorbed and promotes the rotational and vibrational states of the molecule to a higher energy, this energy is lost either by collisions with other molecules or by radiating a photon of either the same or lesser energy. It does not reflect”

I put it to you that you do not understand the nature of light.

Amazing, how did I manage to run a laser optics lab for 25 years and write 50+ papers on the subject and lecture all over the world (including Stellenbosch University, you may have heard of it) without understanding the nature of light? It’s you who doesn’t understand the nature of light and are showing some major misconceptions.

Some energy is exchanged.. But then, radiation keeps moving. It cannot “stop”. So if you say that it does not reflect than I say OK, it radiates back. It is just a different word. It’s not just a different word it’s a totally different process, scientists use words with precise meanings.

The same thing happens in the atmosphere (as I explained: in all spheres!) where the sun hits on the CO2 molecule and the light is radiated back to space for at least 50% there where CO2 has absorptions in the UV, visible, near infra-red and infra red (4 um).

Only in the stratosphere and above where CO2 has time to radiate, and not in the UV (transparent above 205μm) and visible.

They can measure this radiation as it bounces off the moon coming back to earth! So there is no point in denying it.

Actually you haven’t substantiated that assertion, but in any case it would be from the stratosphere.

What I want to know (and I thought you could help me!) is what the cooling and warming is at those particular concentrations of CO2 that are relevant i.e. 200–500 ppm in W/m2 per 12 hours sunlight (cooling) and in W/m2 per 24 hours earthlight(warming) with a standard test.
I put it to you that no one has tested this.

They have, read Clough and Iacono for example.

Preferably I would also include water vapor in my testing because I think that the warming of CO2 compares to virtually nothing when we start adding water vapor..

Look Phil, thanks for putting up with me. Perhaps if you had the right solar radiation spectra to begin with (the ones that I have) you would be able to see the precise dents that are caused by ozone/oxygen, watervapor and CO2 in the spectra (that causes that 30% reflection of light to outer space). In that case we might probably not have this stupid discussion about whether or not there is cooling caused by CO2 or where this happens. The problem remains that I could not find any testing having been done that would give me any type of quantification on this cooling and warming … we are just asked to “believe” that the warming is (much)more than the cooling. I want to see proof. You have to come up with some decent testing to convince me.
At this stage I think we just have to leave it here and agree to disagree.

Henry Pool (10:32:13) :
Henry@Phil
“Its mixing ratio is the same, its partial pressure however is much lower at high altitudes therefore the collision frequency is much lower and the CO2 molecule has more chance to emit IR.”

You now want me to believe that the radiation coming from the sun is somehow disturbed by pressure?

Henry Pool (11:54:40) :
Look Phil, thanks for putting up with me. Perhaps if you had the right solar radiation spectra to begin with (the ones that I have) you would be able to see the precise dents that are caused by ozone/oxygen, watervapor and CO2 in the spectra (that causes that 30% reflection of light to outer space).

Usually they look like these:

The dents as you call them are due to absorption by the various chemical species as annotated in the first link, clearly very little scope for absorption by CO2! And none of them are related to reflection!

In that case we might probably not have this stupid discussion about whether or not there is cooling caused by CO2 or where this happens.

No it wouldn’t make any difference, you’re still wrong.

The problem remains that I could not find any testing having been done that would give me any type of quantification on this cooling and warming … we are just asked to “believe” that the warming is (much)more than the cooling. I want to see proof. You have to come up with some decent testing to convince me.

As I said before:
About 30 percent of the sunlight that beams toward Earth is deflected by the outer atmosphere and scattered back into space. This is the common knowledge. You want me to believe that this 30% is “absorbed” continuously for 12 hours per day by a little bit of ozone, water vapor and carbon dioxide and then transferred as heat to other molecules? In that case there would not be much earth shine i.e. earth albedo is 30 -40% . I would think that something in your theory does not add up.

Clearly they donot show all the absorption / or rather: deflection caused by CO2 in your graph – I have a different one that shows more dents by the CO2. In addition, most recently they discovered absorption of CO2 in the UV area.
No Phil, the reality is that they did not do accurate testing that would show to me how much cooling and how much warming is caused by CO2 due to reflection, deflection, radiating back,re-radiation, or whatever else you want to call it, at the relevant wavelengths areas. …
perhaps you should try and read this paper again and try to understand it:http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X/629/2/1175/61819.web.pdf?request-id=d5c8def3-e610-4d2f-86ed-8436340aca4a

Phil, I think this is a debate that will never get an end. You believe in absorption that will apparently never end, I believe in absorption up to point after which there is reflection or deflection or radiation- back or re-radiation, whatever, .
So, let us agree to disagree, OK?

Nobody has to convince you of anything. If you convince us that you are rational and respond to rational argument, perhaps we will invest more energy in presenting the facts to you. By itself, the fact that you are not persuaded says nothing. Given the excellent science that has been carefully spoon-fed to you here, the fact that you are not convinced suggests that you’re closed-minded; a dyed-in-the-wool believer, not a “skeptic.”

You want me to believe that this 30% is “absorbed” continuously for 12 hours per day by a little bit of ozone, water vapor and carbon dioxide and then transferred as heat to other molecules? In that case there would not be much earth shine i.e. earth albedo is 30 -40% . I would think that something in your theory does not add up.

No the absorption is in addition to the 30%, the back reflected light does show the effects of absorption, the little ‘dents’ observed in the earthshine (which has passed through the atmosphere twice).

Clearly they donot show all the absorption / or rather: deflection caused by CO2 in your graph – I have a different one that shows more dents by the CO2. In addition, most recently they discovered absorption of CO2 in the UV area.

Well put up or shut up, you have yet to produce this spectrum, you can’t discover absorption lines of CO2 where it doesn’t absorb!

No Phil, the reality is that they did not do accurate testing that would show to me how much cooling and how much warming is caused by CO2 due to reflection, deflection, radiating back,re-radiation, or whatever else you want to call it, at the relevant wavelengths areas. …

I have, and its sequel with the extension into the near IR (the only region where CO2 absorbs), basically they model the source of the light as being from high, medium cloud and surface and observe the absorption by the various GH gases. Read it and learn this time.

Phil, I think this is a debate that will never get an end. You believe in absorption that will apparently never end, I believe in absorption up to point after which there is reflection or deflection or radiation- back or re-radiation, whatever, .
So, let us agree to disagree, OK?

No, I won’t ‘agree to disagree’ whatever that means. You’re wrong and whenever you post incorrect statements I’ll refute them.
It’s not a question of ‘belief’ but scientific fact.

You say I don’t understand? I put it to you people that you do not understand and you do not want to understand. It started with Svante Arhenius. He was wrong too. If his formula worked, earth should already be a lot warmer. And since then, nobody has come up with a new formula that takes into account the cooling properties of CO2.
Namely, if you people say that CO2 traps heat (from earthshine 24hours per day) because of the absorption of CO2 in the 14-15um wavelength then I say, good, fine I believe you. But now why do you not want to believe me if I tell you that likewise there must be cooling because of various absorptions of CO2 in the range from 0-5 um (from sunshine 12 hours per day)? This cooling must logically take place everywhere where there is CO2 and where sunlight hits on the molecule regardless of height or pressure.. It is even so apparent that this happens that this radiation can be measured as it reflects back from the moon.
Now if you people want me to believe that CO2 causes warming of our planet the onus is on you to show me the research that would show to me the balance sheet i.e. exactly how much cooling and how much heating is caused by CO2?
What I have found is that I cannot find this research because it seems to me that such an simple observation of mine (ie. that CO2 also must cause cooling) has never been taken into account. Where the IPCC got its values from (for “forcings”) is a mystery to me but I think they were all just weighted values.

Henry Pool (10:25:10) :
So, interpretate your silence now as
a YES,
i.e. we donot really know exactly how much cooling and how much warming is caused by the carbon dioxide!

Definitely Not, you can interpret it as too busy clearing 15″ of snow off my driveway and dealing with a fallen tree limb.
You’re still wrong on the science and will be until you drop the stupid notion of reflection by CO2!

If you would read all of my writings in this post you would find out that a lot more snow is going to come your way in the years ahead, in fact I have already started praying that we will not fall into an LIA!
Enjoy your global “warming” while it lasts.

It was warmer???????? Maybe where they measure the temps – but it’s been the #30 coldest winter Iowa’s had since they started keeping records. That tops the #32 coldest that we had last year. We are definitely not getting any of this “global warming” here.

Ok, can someone please tell me precisely what the “global average temperature” is????
I only see “departure from normal” (which is a misnomer since no one knows what “normal” is – anything goes when it comes to both climate and weather)

Henry@allseasons
I stand under correction and I don’t know about the decimals, but I believe the average global temperature is 288 K (= 15 degrees C= 60 degrees F).
In fact, there really has not been that much global warming, in the past 15 years.
I suggest you look here to carry on that debate:https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/13/congenital-climate-abnormalities